The Tale of Sir Cadogan
by Marquis Carabas
Summary: War, love and silliness.  The life and times of Sir Cadogan, and how a muggle knight ended up getting a portrait in Hogwarts.
1. Old True Tales

_An late afternoon for the old man would typically go as follows._

_1. Ride home to his manor in Hogsmeade after the daily meeting with the Hogwarts governors._

_2. Retreat to the manor's well stocked library, and ease his aging bones into a padded chair by the roaring fire. Pick up a tome from a convenient side-table, and immerse himself. Begin to doze off._

_3. Be abruptly interrupted by a squealing mob of grandchildren bursting through the door and running all over the library and climbing over his chair and tugging at his beard._

_4. Toss aside the book and redirect his attention to the children._

_"Gracious, have your parents been feeding you sugar?" he said, only half-heard by the pack of young boys and girls. One of the older ones threw itself in front of the old man. "Professor Smethwyck taught us how to float things," the boy yelled with excitement, before being violently elbowed aside by a sibling who proudly whipped out her wand and demonstrated her new skill on her grandfather's eyeglasses. The quartz-and-wire contraption bobbed gently up from the old man's nose._

_"None of that," said the old man firmly, grabbing for the glasses. "You know the Headmistress will have my head if she catches me letting you use magic out of school." The child pretended contrition, then sped away to engage in an enthusiastic fight with some of her cousins in the corner._

_So it went; the children playing and running and making as much enthusiastic noise as possible, while the old man clipped ears and distributed sweets and chatted pleasantly at random. The younger ones would chase each other and yell and unleash copious amounts of frantic energy into the dusty room. The older ones would do all of the above, as well as fire little bursts of magic from their proudly brandished wands. This would go on until whatever energy fuelling the children faded away and they began to cluster around his chair and demanded a story. It was the ancient perogative of grandchildren, after all, to demand stories from any old person within hearing range.  
_

_"Ha, I think I've told you lot all my best ones," chuckled the old man, pulling an armful of the smaller children up onto his lap. "What have I told you? "The Fountain of Fair Fortune", "Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump", the story of King Arthur ... are there any you want to hear again?"_

_"I know what you haven't told us," insisted one of the smaller ones, wriggling in his hrasp and looking up at his grandfather with all the deep seriousness a four year old can muster._

_"What's that, then?"_

_"The story of how you came to Hogwarts, grandpa," he said. "What did you do to get here? How did you come to Hogwarts?"_

_The old man didn't answer immediately, though he could feel the suddenly alert gazes of some two dozen children on him from all directions. He stared reflectively into the fire, into the red flames curling around blackened logs, and at the embers glowing like jewels at its heart. A sudden onslaught of half-buried memories can do that to a man._

_God, how long ago was that?, he thought. Thirty years? Thirty five?_

_"You sure you want to hear the story of it all?" he said. "It's very long. And some of it's boring. And there's scary bits."_

_"Yes, yes, we do!" came the chorus from all sides._

_"How scary is it? Do baddies get their heads cut off?"_

_"Are there dragons in it?"_

_"I bet there's lots of blood in it!" People who rhapsodised about the innocent nature of children clearly didn't get out enough._

_"Quieten down, you riotous lot," boomed the old man, waving his arms for silence, and the children obediently hushed, eager with anticipation._

_"Once upon a time," he began, in the creaking, sonorous, eldritch voice he used for storytelling, "In the winter of 1292, on the border between England and Scotland..."_

* * *

It was a dark and stormy night.

Bad weather was, of course, to expected at even the best of times along the border, and especially so during the beginning of a bitter winter. Bloated black rainclouds poured rain and sleet and lightning bolts in random and equal measures across the sky and onto the sodden earth. Streets and gutters in the towns overflowed and sent waves lapping at the edges of houses. Rivers burst their banks. The few people in the open huddled beneath their cloaks and next to sputtering campfires.

It really wasn't the sort of night which any sane person would willingly venture into.

In one of the more obscure and outlying towns, an inn door slammed open and two figures stepped out. The first of them marched with a spring in his step and a whistle on his lips, the joints of his armour squeaking and protesting at the sudden amount of water seeping into them. The one behind him, submerged by a great flapping leather cloak, plodded with considerably less enthusiasm, weighed down by an armful of travelling equipment.

They turned right as they entered the street, and walked along the cobblestones and through the winding streets. Thunder rolled overhead.

"It occurs to me, Sir Cadogan, that, while going into the world and righting wrongs is always a good thing, it might be better done after, say, a full night's rest. And a meal. And a bath," said the cloaked figure, in a voice that rolled across pitches like a bandsaw

"A fair argument, Trilby," boomed the armoured figure of Sir Cadogan, "But why wait, eh? Every second we don't spend travelling is another second wasted. There's things out in the world that need our attention, post-haste!"

"This is filthy weather to be travelling in, sir, and it's late besides," said the cloaked figure, Trilby. "Why don't we just get a room in the inn and just bide there for one night? The wrongs won't get up and go while we're sleeping…"

"That's my point," said Cadogan tersely. "Besides, what's wrong with a little bit of rain?"

"This isn't a "little bit", sir. This is "Biblical thunderstorm" amounts. This is "Genesis 7:10" amounts."

"Hogwash. It's bracing. Clears the system of vile humours."

"Sir, there's a _duck_ swimming down the middle of the road."

"Come now, squire of mine, where's your sense of duty?"

"I left it in the inn, sir, next to the roaring fire and mugs of ale. I hadn't even finished mine," he added reproachfully.

The armoured figure ignored him, walking on and staring at some distant horizon beyond the storm. The lad glanced heavenwards. It wasn't often that his master took funny moods like this, when he decidedly utterly on a course of action and not even the hand of God Almighty could shift his resolve, but it happened often enough that Trilby knew to deal with it. And what could cause it.

Trilby cleared his throat, a sound muffled and almost made unheard by the tumult of rain.

"Sir?"

"What is it, Trilby?"

"When we were back there, in the inn, when I was ordering the ales and finding us a table near the fire, and you were walking around the inn and talking to people … who exactly were you talking to?"

Cadogan stopped, and slowly turned. He stared levelly at his squire, a great internal debate raging in his skull. He was a short and barrel-chested man, with thick black hair and a full beard. Blue-grey eyes glittered behind his helmet's visor in a battered and scarred face, one side of which was a mess of old discoloured burn tissue.

Trilby waited more pensively, fidgeting and twiddling his thumbs. He was a scrawny youth of about sixteen years of age, a son of minor nobility, and possessed of mismatched green and brown eyes and a hooked nose adorned with a swollen pimple. His bowl cut hair was dark brown and dripping with water.

Finally, Sir Cadogan spoke.

"When we were in the inn, I happened to come across a travelling minstrel. He invited me to share a cup or two with him, and how could I refuse such generosity? We started chatting, and he began to speak of a village to the south that was in the most dire of trouble and in urgent need of help."

"How drunk was the mins-" began Trilby, before being cut off by a rising tide of rhetoric as Cadogan warmed to his subject.

"A village where no man, woman, or child could rest easily! A village beset by the most terrible of monsters, a beast only whispered of in dark legends! The minstrel told me, as he finished his third whisky, that he had even witnessed the monster himself and had barely escaped to tell the tale!"

"But -"

"The village needs someone, _anyone_, to save it from evil while its lord cowers in his keep. We shall be their deliverance, or we shall perish gallantly in the attempt!"

There was an awkward silence, followed by Trilby inquiring, with a touch of trepidation, "Sir, what exactly are we going to fight?"

Cadogan placed a hand on his heart and the other on Trilby's shoulder. "My lad," he said with solemn gravitas, "We go south to fight a dragon."

There was another silence while Trilby wrapped his head around the statement, cross-referenced it against received knowledge, and came to a conclusion.

"Sir? Dragons aren't real." Trilby used the same soothing tone of voice one would use to address a escaped mental patient eyeing up some nearby weaponry. It was a tone of voice he used a lot in Cadogan's company.

"Oh, come now, Trilby. Would you accuse that man of lying?"

"No, I'd accuse him of being tremendously drunk."

"He'd had a mere two whiskies and four ales by the time he met me. That wouldn't get my _eyelashes_ drunk."

"You're not most men, sir." This was true in multiple ways.

"Immaterial," said Cadogan, waving away all possible counterarguments and reasoned debate with a wave of his hand. "In any case, there is clearly trouble afoot down south, and we are duty-bound to face it. No more quibbling! We march now, and camp at midnight!" And with that, he turned and strode off, his stained crimson cloak flapping behind him in the wind and rain.

Trilby followed him, all-too-aware that Cadogan wouldn't stop until he found the village. He didn't trust themselves to speak, and the two walked in silence through the last few streets.

A beggar dozing as best he could in a doorway was jolted awake by two handfuls of copper coins jangling in his lap.

"Blessings on you, sirs," he said gratefully, looking up at a knight in rust-bitten armour, with a pimply boy standing just behind him. They murmured blessings back as they moved on though the driving rain and sleet.

"How much does that leave us with?" said Trilby, as they neared the stables and Cadogan called for their steeds.

"By my calculations, lad, about enough for an ale. To share." He chuckled at Tribly's face. "Never mind that. Money given to the needy is never wasted. Besides, I saw you give a handful as well."

"That's beside the point, sir." Trilby sighed. "Baked hedgehog and streamwater for the next few nights, then, I take it?"

"Good fare. Builds character." Cadogan grinned and winked. "Hold on here while I retrieve our steeds." He walked over to the stables and opened the door, calling out to the unseen stable boy. Trilby put down the gear, and waited in the rain.

Sir Cadogan emerged after a few minutes, leading two ponies by their bridles. They spent a few minutes harnessing their various things to the ponie's sides, and stuffed whatever they could into the saddlebags. Finally, Trilby mounted his skinny gray beast, and Cadogan mounted his own chestnut one. They began to move out, the ponies trotting out of the town gates and into the stormy night, with only a cry of "Yer both bloody mad!" from the stable-master to mark their passing.

For a good few minutes they rode on, the town walls shrinking by the minute and finally vanishing behind a veil of rain. Cadogan spoke after about ten minutes in.

"Am I correct in guessing that you're a bit unconvinced about this quest of ours, squire?"

"It's not my place to question your will, sir."

"Come now, Trilby. Give me your honest opinion."

Trilby sighed. He was tired and still irritated about leaving the inn and the rain was getting on his nerves. "Honestly, sir? It'll end the same way it always does. You'll race halfway across the country after some rumour of terrible evil that urgently needs vanquishing, and when you get there, you'll find out that the evil never existed or that it was something else a lot less interesting. And then you'll help people against it anyway, before you tear off after another rumour. This "dragon" will either be some drunken peasant's dream or just another group of bandits. I guarantee you that, sir."

Cadogan was silent. Then, softly, "Tell you what, if the dragon turns out to be a drunk's dream, I'll owe you a skin of wine. If not, you'll owe me one. Fair deal?"

"Alright, sir," said Trilby, mollified slightly by the knowledge that he'd at least be getting someting to drown his troubles in when this latest escapade was over.

After all, he thought with ill-deserved confidence as lightning cracked and thunder pealed, what were the chances that there really was a dragon?


	2. Love and Politics

A hundred miles to the north, the new King of Scots had been crowned.

John Balliol had walked up the gentle green slope of Moot Hill and knelt before the bishop of St Andrews to receive the crown, with his court in attendance and waiting in hushed silence. He was forty-three years old, and until two years ago, would never have expected to inherit the throne.

In a tremulous voice, the bishop had proclaimed Balliol the king as he pressed the crown onto his head, and bade him to sit on the ancient Stone of Scone, and had given him, piece by piece, the rest of the royal regalia. The court poet had then risen as Balliol sat, and recited the man's genealogy in a loud, clear voice; as the entire court, nobles and royal bastards and courtiers and peers and foreign dignitaries alike, drew their swords and pointed them skywards and split the air with deafening cries of "Beannachd Dé Rígh Alban! God Bless the King of Scotland!"

Apart from a spot of rain at the end, Balliol considered, it had been a very good day indeed.

* * *

It had been six hours since then, and the new king was now within the master bedroom in the manor in Perth, generously given to the royal court by the mayor of the town for the duration of their stay. He stood at a window, sipping from a goblet of wine, the fire behind him warming his back as he watched the revelry below, too excited to sleep.

"Don't grow too complacent, my love," said his wife, Isabella, sitting behind him on the bed in the same gown she had worn to the coronation. She was a short and fiery woman four years younger than her husband. "You know Bruce and the others won't stop their plotting even after it's been settled."

"Oh, certainly, but what of it?" replied Balliol. "They're now obliged to swear loyalty to me as the new king, else I'll have just cause to declare them outlaws and take their lands." He permitted himself a happy daydream at the prospect. "Even if they resist me openly, I can count on Edward's support."

When the last king of Scotland, Alexander the Third, had died, and his infant granddaughter and only heir had shortly followed suit, Scotland had teetered on the verge of civil war. The Guardians of Scotland, in desperation, had invited Edward Longshanks, the powerful and avaricious king of England, to arbitrate between the claimants. The king and and his auditors had supported Balliol over the other noble claimants that desired the Scottish throne, and Balliol had at last triumphed over his old rivals in the Bruce family.

"Beware that one, dear," said Isabella coldly. "He cares not for a just succession, but for his own glory and power. He'll support you if you're useful to him, but he won't hesitate to tear you and the realm apart if necessary."

"Nonsense. He wants the best for his sister kingdom, I'm certain of that. He was perfectly polite and modest all the times I met him. He's a good man."

"So was Lucifer," muttered Isabella.

John sighed, and turned away from the window, bored with politics for the evening. "Enough of this sort of talk. Just because I've become a king doesn't mean I have to deal with the game of thrones every minute of every hour. And frankly..." His gaze wandered up and down his wife's form. "Frankly, I can think of other ways to spend the next hour."

Isabella grinned a wry grin at the predictability of men when they were in a good mood. "Ach, you old devil, I'd swear you're insatiable."

"For you, my dear, certainly." He sat down on the bed beside her, and raised the goblet to her mouth. She gently sipped at the rim of the ruby-red liquid, and gently grasped the goblet as well and offered it in turn to her husband. He sipped leisurely from it, while their free arms entwined around each other and they moved closer together…

They paused mid-embrace, as there was a loud metallic clink behind them, and turned. There was nothing behind them, nothing save for the stand holding Balliol's armour in a far corner. The armour was the finest available, a knee-length chainmail hauberk reinforced with a steel breastplate and greaves and gauntlets. The gauntlets rested on the pommel of an Italian-forged arming sword. A great helm, decorated with patterns of gold, topped the stand.

The helm swivelled to face the royal couple, and said, in a doleful and metallic voice, "Greetings are extended to the new king and queen of the muggles of Scotland."

Balliol sprayed his mouthful of wine across the room, some of which splattered onto the armour. It made no response, save to say, in an even more doleful tone, "Please stand ready to receive the representative of wizardry."

Isabella dropped the goblet. Scarlet liquid pooled across the stone floor.

Then the fire turned green.

They gaped at the emerald-green fire.

And then a woman came out of the flames.

She seemed to just materialise and take solid form out of sparks and smoke, becoming a small and slender woman with fine blue robes and black hair tied back in a bun. She stepped out from the fireplace, ducking to avoid the lintel, and straightened up as she brushed specks of soot and dust off her robes. She fixed her gaze on the stunned Balliol and Isabella.

"Good evening, Your Majesties," she said in an prim and even Highland accent. "I trust ye've had a pleasant coronation, and nae doubt ye have many questions …"

"Guards!" yelled Balliol, grabbing for the ceremonial sword leaning on the foot of the bed, while Isabella swivelled and seized at a crossbow hanging from the wall. "Guards! Come quickly, there's witchery afoot!"

* * *

_One surprisingly brief and shockingly violent interlude later._

_

* * *

_

"Shall we try that again, Your Majesties?" said the woman, her face showing no sign of exhaustion, her oak wand held tight in one hand. "I'll introduce myself, if ye let go of that blade."

Balliol's paralysed fingers twitched enough to release the sword, and he crumpled next to it as he was released from the paralysis she had placed on him. He pushed himself up blearily, blinking at the scene around him.

The four guards that had burst into the room, each one a knight-at-arms, fully armoured and armed with great swords and shields, had been met by the old woman clenching a short length of thin wood. Sir FitzRoy of Argyll now dangled unconscious from a ceiling rafter. His twin brother lay out cold on the ground below him, every so often sneezing out a bat, each fluttering out of the shattered window and into the night sky. Sir Taran was slumped against the wall, his eyelids fluttering and his armour still smoking. Sir Kenneth of Strathtay appeared to have been rammed through the oak wardrobe head-first.

Isabella struggled from behind her bonds, made from when the crossbow had somehow disassembled itself in her hands and turned into a coil of wood and metal and cord, which had wound around her as fast as chain lightning and bound her to a bed post. She swore furiously at the intruder, using terminology that would have made a Glaswegian deck-hand blush.

Balliol, from his prone position, snaked out a hand for the fallen sword, which was kicked away by the woman.

"Nane of that," she said firmly. "Shall we be civilised about this, Your Majesties?"

"God rot you in hell, sorcerer," spat Balliol. "Work whatever satanic wiles you must, but I shall give you no satisfaction."

"What he said," snarled Isabella.

"Oh, for Merlin's sake," cursed the woman, and she put her wand on the fireplace's mantelpiece. "There? See? I shalnae harm ye pair. Now stop acting the thick-headed fools and let us introduce ourselves _politely_."

Balliol staggered to his feet, and Isabella shrugged off the loosed bonds, and they drew themselves up as regally as they could while fixing the woman with piercing (or so they imagined) looks.

"We are the King and Queen of Scotland, madam," Balliol said in a haughty manner. "Sovereigns of the highlands, lowlands and outlying islands of the realm by divine right and by ancient law. And by what right do you burst unannounced into our private chambers?"

"I am Katelyn Canmore, the current Headmistress of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry," she replied simply. "And I am here to alert ye to the presence of the magical community in the British Isles."

"Hogwhat?" said Balliol, adding "baffled" to his list of current emotions. "Magical community?" Isabella said with a note of trepidation in her voice.

"Let's have a talk."

As she spoke, Balliol's jaw dropped and Isabella's remained clamped shut.

Words like "magic" and "wizard" and "wand" drifted in the hot air of the chamber, words which had previously been mere superstition turned into an uncanny reality by the Canmore woman. Visions of magic and fay creatures danced across Balliol's mind. Witches and wizards, the sworn enemies of God according to the church, were turned into humans who just happened to be able to warp reality with their thoughts and existed all across the civilised world. It wasn't a typical conversation, by any means.

Isabella's mind processed the information furiously as it came, and read between the lines.

After a half-hour's crash course in the wizarding world, Katelyn leaned back against the wall and regarded the royal couple with a calculating look. They seemed lost in thought.

"Do ye have any mair questions? I can imagine this must be quite a shock."

" "Shock" is putting it mildly," said Balliol leadenly. "Er … I do have a question, actually. Do you tell this to every king in Europe? Do they all know about this?"

"Wherever there are muggles, there are wizards. Wherever there is a muggle king, the representative of wizardy for the nation he rules will inform him."

"Muggle?"

"Our term for those who cannae use magic."

"And you're the representative for the wizards in Scotland, I take it?" said Isabella, her manner shrewd and her mind calculating. "Are you their queen or duchess, or what?"

"Not just for Scotland, but for all of Britain," answered Katelyn. "And I have nae noble title, save the honour of being the Headmistress of Hogwarts, and of being an unofficial first amongst equals. We wizards dinnae yet have an organised government as ye muggles do. There are noble families amongst us, but nae one person with the right to rule. Perhaps there will be someday, but not yet."

Balliol and Isabella sat in silence.

"I will say this, though," added Katelyn. "The purpose of this conversation is to remove whatever fears you have of hidden wizardry, and to assure you we can co-exist in peace. As long as muggles wage nae war on wizards, no wizard shall lay hands on a muggle. None of us will benefit if open conflict were to arise. And I'm sure you can appreciate why it's for the best if this conversation remains known only to you."

Balliol and Isabella nodded slowly, and Katelyn stood away from the wall and stretched with a groan of relief.

"That's all that needs to be said, I think. Hopefully I willnae have to bother you two again, and both our peoples can live in peace." She stepped towards the fire, which had since faded back to orange, and dipped a hand into a pouch hanging from her belt.

"There's one thing that may be necessary," said Isabella suddenly, making Balliol and Katelyn turn in surprise. "As a sign of good faith, and an assurance of good intentions, why don't we post a representative at each other's courts? We could send a knight of the realm, and you could send one of your own. To act as intermediaries and diplomats, of course."

"Unnecessary," said Katelyn, dismissing the suggestion with a wave of her hand. "Contact should be kept to a minimum, and I already hae means of getting information on the affairs of muggles..."

"Then," Isabella pressed on, her voice as smooth and deadly as garrotting silk, "Permit us to place a representative with you, so we may not remain entirely in the dark about the affairs of wizards."

"That's only fair," said Balliol, cottoning on to what his wife was doing. "We insist that this is done."

Katelyn's face locked in a determined glare.

"Ye are in nae position to "insist" upon _anything_, Your Majesties," she snapped. "Ye saw me, one witch, disarm and defeat four of your knights. Dinnae press me on this. Wizards willnae suffer _any_ muggle interference, and that's final."

"You won't suffer it, but you might not survive it either," said Isabella.

"Was that a threat. Your Majesty?" said Katelyn in a voice as cold and tranquil as an Arctic wind.

"Why, yes, actually, it was," said Isabella. "You wouldn't bother alerting us to your presence if you didn't fear our actions if we discovered you by accident. You want to try and soothe us, that much is clear. I believe wizards have reason to fear muggles were they discovered, and I believe that they're right in that regard."

"With that in mind, Headmistress," finished Isabella, with a cold smile, "Would it really be asking so much to appoint one representative, so as to allay our fears?"

Balliol, still able to be awed by the woman he had married, watched her lock gazes with Katelyn. The air crackled with tension.

Katelyn, after several long moments, slowly reached into another pouch and withdrew a sheet of parchment from it. She passed it to Isabella.

"Write a message to your candidate on it and pass it through the fire once you're done," she said. "If they accept, I'll accept them as a representative. Farewell, Your Majesties."

She turned again, retrieved her wand, stopped, said "Och, that reminds me," and walked to each of the four knights, tapping the wand against their heads while muttering "_Obliviate._" Once she was finished, she fixed Balliol and Isabella with a rakish grin.

"I'll leave it to ye to explain to them in the morning how they ended up unconscious in the royal bedchamber," she said, and then she left through the fire.

Balliol and Isabella sat and brooded on the bed in silence.

"Ksshgwthd," murmured Sir Kenneth from within the wardrobe.

"Shut up," snapped Balliol, cupping his head in his hands. "God, how did this happen? I didn't want anything complicated this evening, and one damn half-hour scuppered that magnificently."

"Then the sooner we choose a candidate, the sooner we can ignore it unless it becomes an issue," said Isabella soothingly.

"You're right." Balliol sighed and sat upright, his brow furrowed in concentration. "Perhaps one of our lords or knights could have it thrust upon them. Maybe Bruce..."

"No," said Isabella. "You'd take a gamble trying to order him directly for a matter as secret as this, and he'd likely try to turn the wizards against you."

"That's true," Balliol conceded. "So we can't choose anyone with dubious loyalties, by that logic."

The royal couple put their heads together.

"The Earl of Argyll?" suggested Balliol.

"Too god-fearing. He'd demand that we hunt wizards out and put them to the sword rather than treat with them."

"Then how about … ?"

"Actually, you wouldn't want to send off any man who was particularly loyal to you either. You're still in a shaky seat, dear, and you'll need every man you've got to hold the throne. And for that matter, any man you choose will baulk at the idea of going into a court of wizards unless they're screwed in the head."

"What an inspiring selection," muttered Balliol. "Nobody who's disloyal to me, nobody who's a faithful vassal, nobody who's overly religious, and preferably one who's insane. Suffering Christ."

His head dropped. Isabella's eyes brightened, and she rose to her feet

"A name occurs," she said.

Balliol looked into his wife's eyes. Then his face lit up.

"Ah. I think I know who you're talking about."

"Oh yes. That should be a pleasant surprise for the wizards, don't you think? He's a landless knight-errant besides; he'll jump at the chance of an official position. Well, unofficial, strictly speaking, but you get my point."

"Will we be legally able to order him? If what I've heard of him is true, he's taken no oath of loyalty to any king."

"I'll give him an incentive," said Isabella, rubbing his hands together with glee. "I'll get you your inks and quills, dear. We can finish the letter before the night's out."

"How do you suppose they'll find him?" said Balliol, glancing at his writing desk. "He's on the road most of the time."

"That's their problem," said Isabella.

* * *

In the Headmaster's study at Hogwarts Castle, Katelyn Canmore was calmly sipping from a glass of Firewhisky while her daughter paced and argued.

"I still dinnae understand why ye didnae just refuse them, mum," said Katherine Canmore, a replica of her mother, with black hair, dark eyes, and a strong jawline. She wore dark blue robes, and the blue-and-bronze badge of a Ravenclaw prefect twinkled on her chest.

"They were threatening trouble, which we've got enough of already," replied her mother patiently. "There'll be little harm in it. Controlling one muggle willnae be difficult in the slightest."

"It's the principle of the thing. Whit if they start thinking they can order whitever they please of wizards? We'll be nothing more than..."

"Be careful, dear," said Katelyn, her voice lower and colder. "Be careful of whit ye sound like."

Katherine opened her mouth, then shut it. "Sorry, mum," she said with a flush. "But are ye sure this willnae create a new problem? There'll be some who'll dislike the notion of a muggle coming to Hogwarts. Especially now, with tensions running so high."

"That's a risk I'm ready to take," said Katelyn, draining the last of the Firewhisky.

For a few minutes, there was nothing but the sound of flickering flames in the office, and from far below, the sound of the last pupils who were leaving for the Christmas holidays laughing and running in the courtyard.

From outside the door, somebody said "Macaroons" to the great ugly stone gargoyle, and Hadrian Dunbar, the Headmistress's assistant, entered. He was a small man, with pale eyes and short white-blond hair, and he cautiously entered holding a sheet of parchment.

"Here's the letter from the muggles, madam," he said, bowing slightly as he presented the paper to Katelyn.

"Thank ye, Hadrian," she said as she took it. She unfolded it, and looked it over.

"It's to be presented to someone called Sir Cadogan," she said, "And he's a knight-errant, apparently, so finding him could be tricky."

"Could I humbly suggest assigning locating the knight in question to the Malfoy twins, madam?" said Hadrian. "They're talented at seeking out targets."

"Guid idea. See to it, Hadrian," she said, handing the paper back, and Hadrian bowed once more and left.

"Cadogan," mused Katelyn. "I dinnae suppose ye've heard of him, dear?"

"No, mum."

"Well," said Katelyn, echoing Trilby's ill-advised confidence many miles southwards, "I'm sure he'll be nae bother."


	3. Highway Meetings

Three days into Cadogan's and Trilby's journey, the iron-gray skies paled and became the colour of lamb's wool. Flakes began to fall from the sky intermittently, mixing with the rainwater and mud as they reached the ground and frosting over the paved highway.

By the time they had reached the heart of Yorkshire by the seventh of December, the rain and sleet had yielded completely to the snowclouds, and the land for miles around had been painted a pristine white. The trees in all directions slumped under the weight of snow, fields and wildland alike had been rendered indistinguishable, and even the busiest roads were all but submerged as the tracks left by carts and horses were filled in anew every hour.

Cadogan spoke little but smiled a lot. He liked winters for the way they transformed the earth, for the sharpness they left in the air that made his blood stir all the hotter, for the magic wrought by a simple snowfall.

Personally, Trilby found the magic wore off after the first few miles spent wading through knee-high snow drifts.

"Feel the air, Trilby!" boomed Cadogan, leading his laden pony by the reins along the road, Trilby struggling beside him. "That's the air to set a fire ablaze in your chest. That's the kiss of Lady Winter, telling you to persevere and conquer all."

Trilby muttered something indecorous about Lady Winter that went unheard by Sir Cadogan, whose gaze remained on the road ahead which vanished behind snowfall after about a hundred metres.

"Look," he said, raising his free steel-clad hand up to eye level and pointing at some distant figure on the road. "There's someone coming up the road. Run forward and ask them if we're on the right track, there's a lad."

Trilby passed his reins to Sir Cadogan and half ran – half staggered through the snow towards the nearing figure, who turned out to be a farmer wrapped in thick hemp clothing and bearing a basket of kale on his back. The man looked up suspiciously as Trilby neared.

"What be you wanting?"

"Er, is this the road to …" Trilby hesitated, then turned around. "What was the name of the village again, sir?"

"Carrford-upon-Ure, the minstrel said," called back Cadogan.

"What he said," said Trilby, turning back to the farmer. "Are we on the right road to there, or …?"

"You be on the right road to there, for I've just come from there. Three miles more and you'll be there." The farmer hawked and spat into a snowmound. "Queer folk they be, though. When I walked through, they was prattling on about some dragon a-molestin' them. Must have all been stone-drunk."

"Well, to be honest," said Trilby, lowering his voice so Cadogan wouldn't hear him. "He's heard the rumour of a dragon down south, and we're going there for that reason."

"Aye? Well, good luck to you, and I'll have a rogue banshee for you to a-deal with after you be done." The man snorted. "You'd be best to stay there once you've been disappointed. You be mad to travel at all."

"Very true, and you've taken a load off my mind, sir." Trilby reached into an inside pocket of his cloak for a wrapped package. "I don't have any money to give you, but here's half a hedgehog. It's been baked, though it's a bit cold."

"Thank you. Kale do grow a bit monotonous after a while," said the man , accepting the package and nodding to Trilby. "Fare-thee-well, and best of luck to your dragon-slaying." He trudged off past Trilby, and exchanged nods with Cadogan as he passed him.

"Well? Are we on the right road?" said Cadogan when he reached Trilby.

"We are, sir. Just three miles to go, actually."

"Excellent! Why, I can see this matter done with before the day's out!" Cadogan strode forward again with renewed energy. "Onwards, squire! To the aid of the helpless! To victory! To glory!"

"To whisky," said Trilby, falling into line.

* * *

The farmer, Erik, stopped and watched the pair walk away until they were hidden by the snow. He then shrugged, and continued on his way along the path and back to his own croft and land.

Well, you did bump into funny folk everywhere you went, that was for certain. A pimply squire and a wandering knight by the looks of them, chasing after a fairy-story.

Odd thing, though. He had heard stories before of a mad knight-errant who travelled across the kingdoms. That couldn't be the same man, could it?

Erik put the matter from mind. Knights belonged in their castles, kings belonged on their thrones, and everyone else did real work and that was the way of it. Stories had no value. The sooner he was back home to his wife and daughters with the kale he had gotten in exchange for that salt pork, the better.

As he trudged along, he could almost swear that he heard other voices from further up the trail. Surely there couldn't be more than one set of travellers on the road? But travellers there were, and as they drew closer he heard snatches of their conversation.

"...intolerable. I will complain to her later, rely upon that." That was a man's voice, and the one that came in response was a woman's.

"Why? We do no more than our duty to her, and it's our skills that are needed for this."

"Our _skills_, sister dearest, must needs be used for finding her enemies. For hurting Gaunt's cravens. For winning our shadow war. Not for haring off after wretched muggles."

"I trust that there's a reason behind it. You should too."

"Perhaps." The man did not sound mollified. "Look, there's some muggle up ahead. Maybe they'll have some sort of lead, because gods know we should have had one days ago."

"Let us ask them." And as the woman said that, the figures took form amidst the snow. They were identical apart from their genders, both clad in peculiar rich long green robes with silver edging. Both wore pale blonde hair down to their waists, and the man was clean-shaven. Neither could have been older than twenty-five or so, and both were seemingly impervious to the cold that bit at Erik's bones.

"Excuse me! You there, scrofulous muggle!" called the man, waving an arm impatiently as they strode forward.

"_Tact_, brother. We spoke about this," said the woman firmly. Erik saw that they bore no pack or sack across their backs, and all they had at their waists were short sticks of carved wood.

"I mean; you, my good fellow!" said the man with nary a beat. "We are in search of a knight. A particular knight, who goes by the name of Sir Cadogan. Have you heard of or met such a person?"

"Well, might be," said Erik uncertainly. "Do you know what he looks like."

"He has blue eyes, black hair, and burn tissue along one side of his face. He also may travel with a squire..."

"Yes, I have!" said Erik suddenly. "Just passed him and the lad not five minutes ago on this very road. Travelling the same road as you, mi'lords, to Carrford-upon-Ure. Said they were going off to fight a dragon, or some such nonsense."

The twins exchanged glances. "We should investigate that while we're there," said the man.

"Beg pardon?" said Erik.

"Never you mind," said the woman. "You've just made our job a lot easier, my good fellow. Please accept this small token as a gesture of our gratitude." She held out her palm, in which something glinted. Erik looked at it cautiously, and boggled when he saw a large gold coin twenty times more valuable than his entire meagre holdings out together.

"Well?" said the woman. "Take it. It won't bite you." Erik slowly reached out a hand, and at the same moment as the woman dropped into his hand with his gaze still fixed upon the coin, he felt something thin and hard tap the side of his head and a man's voice saying "_Obliviate._"

"You met no knight or squire," said the voice reasonably. "You met no wizards. You met no travellers at all. You found that coin by the side of the road. You will go home to your family while there is still daylight."

Erik nodded, and walked past in the direction of his home. As he walked, his thoughts turned to the coin he had found, and how he would break the great news to his family. Behind him, unheard, the Malfoy twins spoke.

"At long bloody last." said Corvus, his voice taught with joy, "We can get that knight and put an end to this ridiculous assignment."

"All for the better," said Hydra, her own voice calm and even. "The muggle said they were going to some place called Carrford-upon-Ure. Do you have any idea where that is exactly? Can you Apparate there?"

"Not a clue. He said it was further along the road."

"How far as the crow flies?"

Corvus grinned, and shifted form. Where he had stood, a black-headed and gray-bellied hooded crow perched on a paving stone.

"Go on ahead and watch the situation," said Hydra. "I'll go by foot. This is no sort of weather for my form."

The crow cawed and took flight, buffeted by freezing winds as it sped southwards. Below it, Hydra of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Malfoy stepped primly though the snow.

* * *

They had reached Carrford-upon-Ure, and had been greeted by a desperate mob of villagers as soon as word spread that a knight had arrived.

"Terrible problems it's been causing us," said the provost, a plump man who tugged nervously at his silver chain of office. "Terrible problems, and nary a word from anyone to help us until you came, my lord."

"'Sir' will be sufficient," said Sir Cadogan from atop his pony. Trilby stood behind him with a puzzled expression. Were the villagers playing some sort of elaborate joke? They all seemed to be in on it.

"Nobody's dead or et yet, sirs, by God's mercy," said a hollow-cheeked farmer. "But it et a half-dozen of my sheep, and torched my wheat barn. Horrid beast, so it is, and arrers just bounce off it."

"It ate my bloody bull!" shouted an indignant yeoman at the back. "What's our bloody baron done about it? Nothing, that's bloody what!"

("Why's he riding a pony, ma?" said a child in the crowd to its mother. "I thought knights had horses with curtains on them? And aren't knights taller than that? Why's his face all burned?"

"Shush, dear," said its mother, administering an affectionate clip around its ear.)

"Lead me to it then," said Sir Cadogan as a crow flew overhead, "And I shall face this beast in your name, good folk."

"You're a true knight, sir, that's plain," said the relieved provost. "If you'll just follow me, sir..."

They set off east from the village, attended by a nervous and curious collection of townsfolk. The snowfall thinned as they moved, and Trilby's brows furrowed even more. This was taking a joke too far, surely...

As they rounded a rocky rise in the landscape, turned a corner, and fixed their sights on a cave, Trilby's eyes narrowed as he regarded the sight before him.

Then his eyes bulged, and he stood frozen, helpless to do anything other than stand and point and say "Bu … but … no, that … that can't … bu … bu …"

Cadogan leaned down for a whisper.

"Looks like you owe me a whisky, lad," he said in a satisfied tone.


	4. Steel and Scale

The beast dozing in the mouth of the cave hewn into the rock face was coiled like an ouroboros; a great lizardine head rested next to an arrow-tipped tail. The beast was nearly thirty feet long from nose-tip to tail, and was covered with dark purple-grey scales that coated it like a suit of armour. Massive wings were flattened against its back as the creature snored, gouts of flame searing out of its nostrils and across the melting snow with every breath. Claws and teeth as long and sharp as daggers gleamed in the soft sunlight.

Any muggle looking at it would have called it a dragon.

Any specialist in magical creatures, on the other hand, would looked at it and said "My word, it's a Hebridean Black. Must be a young male, judging by that body shape. Big brute, and handsome too. It must have found a good food source. I wonder what it's doing this far south?"

As the group drew near, one great purple eye slammed open and locked onto Sir Cadogan. Every villager standing behind him held their breath and took a step back.

Cadogan looked at it evenly from the back of his pony, and then said "Trilby, go and get me my lance, axe, and shield, would you?"

Trilby, mutely, still mesmerised by the impossible creature, reached for the weaponry hanging from the straps at his pony's side. First he passed up Sir Cadogan's shield; a huge wooden roundshield reinforced with iron bands across the back and front. Next came his lance; a four-metre long monster made of a long oak shaft tipped with an iron leaf-shaped head. Last came his poleaxe. The axe's metre-long oak shaft was tipped with a steel head, bearing a broad axe blade on one side and a curved spike on the reverse and a spearhead at the top.

Cadogan slung the shield across his back, grasped the lance in one hand, and shoved the axe through his belt. He slammed down his visor, and the dragon rose to all fours and spread its wings wide. Smoke streamed from its nostrils, and its purple eyes blazed.

"Will you need my help, sir?" managed Trilby, against his shock and all better instincts. "I … do you know what you're doing, sir?"

"Thank you, Trilby, but I can do this by myself," said Sir Cadogan. His eyes narrowed behind his visor, meeting the dragon's own gaze. "And when do I ever _not_ know what I'm doing?"

With that, before Trilby could respond, he spurred the pony to a trot, and then to a gallop, his red cloak flapping behind him as he held his lance high in the air and bellowed "HAVE AT YOU!"

The dragon roared in response and charged forwards, its claws tearing through and sending great clumps of snow flying behind it as it Above them, high in the grey sky, a crow circled.

Sir Cadogan didn't lower his lance, Trilby observed with alarm. You were meant to keep the things couched, but he was holding it upright as if it was a banner. The whole point of the damn things was to bring the full force of rider and horse onto a single steel-sharp point, so why was he …?

And why weren't his feet properly in the stirrups, for that matter? They were just dangling loose against the pony's sides. Why wasn't he holding his shield? Why was he charging at the beast straight-on? _What was he doing?_

The dragon narrowed its eyes as Sir Cadogan neared; and when he was ten metres distant it stopped and arched its head back, smoke brimming and spilling out of its mouth and nostrils. It then shot its head forward and blew a line of white-hot fire from its mouth straight at the knight.

Sir Cadogan, as soon as he saw the dragon rear back, angled the lance at the ground, his hands tight around the shaft. As the dragon's head shot forward on its great serpentine neck, he slammed the lance's base into the ground. And as the fire gouted forth, he pushed with all his might, the planted lance giving him the footing he needed to push himself forwards and upwards into the air. A split second after he vaulted off the pony's back, the line of fire flashed through where he had been sitting and singed the hairs on the pony's back. The animal whinnied with fear and veered sharply to the left and away from the dragon.

The dragon blinked, confused. Its instincts told it there should have been a puddle of molten iron and various chemicals where its fire had struck. But the fire had struck empty air, and the pony beneath the knight had fled, and the knight himself...

The dragon looked upwards, and saw, for a split second, the knight flying through the air. His axe was unsheathed and shining in his hand, his tarnished armour wasn't so much as scorched, and his eyes behind the helmet's visor gleamed with adrenaline and a mad delight.

Then the knight crashed on top of the dragon's head, and the axe's blade flashed against dark scales, and dragon blood turned the snow dark green.

* * *

"What is it," said Hydra Malfoy to her brother, who had touched down before her in crow form when she was two miles from the village.

"Do you remember how to cast the Conjunctivitis Curse?" asked Corvus. "I don't think a Stunning Spell's going to cut it."

"I can. Why? Is there really a dragon?"

"Oh yes. And you might want to hurry up as well. Our knight has bitten off more than he might be able to chew."

* * *

Snow flew in all directions, as the earth was torn apart with the force of the battle.

The dragon was a whirlwind of slashing claws and ripping teeth, its tail stabbing and and flailing as it hurled itself at Sir Cadogan. Four tons of armoured hide and muscle barrelled forward, and blood rained on the ground from the several cuts it had taken from the axe blade. The dragon's eyes blazed with purple fire, and flames danced in the back of its throat.

Sir Cadogan was tiny next to the dragon, but he held his ground against it. He danced around it, nimble in spite of his weight of armour, jabbing with the axe's spearhead at its belly and sweeping at its legs with the axe blade. Claw met steel with a skirl of sparks every time he knocked aside a swipe from it.

He ducked under a stroke from its tail, the arrow-shaped spike on the tip slicing the plume off his helmet, and drove forward with the axe, ramming it into the hardened scales that covered the dragon's side. A great claw flew at his back and seized at the cloak rending the red cloth and entwining it with the curved claws. The dragon tugged back, and Cadogan fell onto his back as the bottom half of the cloak was torn away. He sprawled on the ground, grabbing for his dropped axe, as the dragon's shadow loomed over him.

A claw dashed down, and Cadogan rolled to the side onto his back just in time to avoid the claw as it crashed into the snow. The dragon's other claw flew down, and scored silver lines across Cadogan's shield. He wheezed, all the air knocked out of him by the impact with the ground and the claw, and he tried to crawl forwards, to get to his poleaxe...

The dragon's jaw dashed down and clamped around the shield's edges, and the dragon hefted Cadogan into the air with its mouth like a cat playing with a mouse. Cadogan struggled, but the shield's straps bit tightly and firmly across him, and he flailed behind him with his steel-clad hands, for all the good it would do.

A blast of dragon flame answered him; not as concentrated as the earlier fire but hot enough. It streamed onto the shield and flared off to the sides, red flames hurling themselves at Cadogan's head and legs. He struggled not to yell with pain as the fire heated the metal, and he continued to struggle as the dragon held him tight in its mouth.

A cry from below him turned Cadogan's head downwards, and he saw Trilby charging, his short sword drawn and aimed at the dragon's exposed midriff.

The short blade gleamed silver, then red, as it punched in and out of the dragon's belly, and Cadogan fell to the ground as the dragon roared with pain. He rose to his feet as the dragon renewed its attack, sending the tip of its tail flying at Trilby's heart. Cadogan grabbed up at the tail as it sped forward above his head, clapping it tight between his hands and pulling it down. The dragon roared with fury and flicked its tail, sending Cadogan spinning to the ground.

Spitting out dirt and snow, he looked up and saw his poleaxe scant inches away. He seized it and leapt to his feet, and turned to face the dragon. It had turned as well and had its back to him, its tail threshing through the air above his head as it struck at Trilby, who was desperately dodging and ducking the assault from the dragon.

Even from behind it, Cadogan could see smoke drifting up from its mouth. The muscles around its wings were corded and tense, and he guessed that the beast was preparing to fly, and to finish off himself and his squire with fire.

He started running at its back, and he leapt just as it lifted free from the ground, grabbing onto one of the spikes that ran along its back, a metre or so from its wings. The dragon hissed and twisted, and breathed fire down the length of its body which Cadogan only avoided with a desperate twist and a grab at the base of the wing on the left. Screaming fire, the dragon twisted and bucked in the air, trying to dislodge the mad knight, but nothing short of a giant could have prised him off the beast's back.

Cadogan hefted his poleaxe with one hand as he clung on like grim death with the other, and he swung it forward in a glimmering arc that ended when it bit into the wing's base with an audible grinding against bone.

The dragon twisted frantically for the last time and dislodged Cadogan at last, but it was too late. The angle it was caught at in the air and the paralysed wing meant that gravity could finally assert itself; which it did so with a thud that echoed into the village beyond.

Trilby, once he had finished catching his breath, stumbled forward to help Sir Cadogan out the snowpile he had fallen into. With a great heave, he helped the exhausted, blood-spattered knight to his feet, and they both turned to regard the stricken dragon.

"Thank you. Your assistance was timely," said Cadogan, picking up his poleaxe.

"I was under the impression that you knew what you were doing, and didn't need my help," said Trilby with a weary chuckle.

"None of your cheek, Trilby. And besides, it was working swimmingly until it caught my damn cloak." He turned to regard the ruined the vestment. "Blast. I'll need to get a new one." He turned back to the dragon, and frowned as he looked at the creature.

"It doesn't seem right to kill it while it's on the ground like this," he said. Trilby looked at him askance.

"It's not really any different from putting an animal out of its misery," the squire pointed out. Cadogan looked down at the dragon, and shifted his grip on his poleaxe.

"Cut it into collops, sir!" came a distant shout from the crowd of villagers, who were cautiously venturing forward. "The children can eat dragon stew tonight!"

"I wouldn't recommend it," said a voice behind the shouter. "Eating dragon meat that hasn't been properly dried can result in fits of madness and severe hallucinations. And even if you dry it, you're still in for a fevered night."

The shouter turned, and saw an attractive woman with long blonde hair and pale gray eyes, wearing rich green robes. Behind her, her male double stood with his wand in his hand. Hydra's own wand was held low and unseen, and was angled up at the shouter, who spat into his hand and tried to smooth his hair down upon being spoken to by the woman.

"Er, is that right?" he said. "What's your name, my lady?" The man behind her drifted into the crowd, while staring at the tableau of knight and dragon with surprise.

"_Obliviate_," said Hydra.

"That's a nice na..."

There was the distant thunk of an axe blade, as the Malfoy twins began their work. Sir Cadogan wiped the blade clean on the snow.

"That was what I call a worthy opponent," he said to Trilby. "The beast had to be dealt with, of course, but hope you go down as furiously as it did." He straightened up, and sheathed his poleaxe. "Where's that pony?"

"Er, sir?" said Trilby, looking over Cadogan's shoulder. "I think we're about to receive visitors."

Cadogan turned, and saw the villagers dispersing and moving back to the village for no apparent reason, their faces glazed over. Away from them and towards Sir Cadogan and Trilby strode a man and woman, with matching strange robes and blonde hair.

"You there, scrofulous muggle!" called the man before he was elbowed in the ribs by his apparent twin.

"Greetings, sir knight," she said as they drew nearer. "We request a few moments of our time, so that we may deliver a message to you of great importance, from the King of Scots himself."

"What?" said Sir Cadogan, staring as the oddly-dressed woman drew out a roll of parchment and extended it to him. Her twin stared at him sullenly, while Trilby looked at the pair uncertainly. Sir Cadogan took the parchment with trepidation, and slowly unfurled it while keeping his gaze fixed on the twins. Trilby's hand was on his sword.

"Who are you? What did you do to the villagers? Why did they leave?" blurted Trilby, more ill-at-ease than Sir Cadogan

"We are but couriers, and we did nothing that harmed the villagers," said the woman smoothly.

"We are Corvus and Hydra Malfoy, of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Malfoy," said the man. "See that you remember these names."

Cadogan unrolled and read the parchment.


	5. Ironlith

The parchment read,

_John of Balliol, by the grace of God, King of Scotland, Lord of the Gallovidians, and Lord of Hitchin and encompassed lands, to the recipient of this decree, greetings. Know ye that, for the profit of the realm and to the honour of God and Church, we will that the ordinances herein are obeyed utterly and promptly by those concerned upon receival._

_We ordain henceforth that the knight-errant Cadogan, accompanied by all persons bound to his service, take up office in perpetuity as an ambassador from the royal court to the nation of wizardry extant in Scotland and throughout the Brittanic Isles. The bondage of Sir Cadogan to our person, and the thus forfeiture of his status as a free knight, shall be given for the duties entrusted to him; those namely being the act of ambassadorship between the Kingdom of Scotland and the wizards,to relay precisely and immediately such messages to the wizards as shall be delivered by our person, to act under complete confidentiality and circumspection as shall be required by the delicate nature of his posting, and to observe all reasonable courtesies towards his hosts in the fulfilment of his duties._

_Ordained at Perth under the eyes of God and in the sight of King and Queen of Scots, on the eve of the fall of November in the year of our Lord 1297, in the first year of our reign._

And there it ended, with a full half-page left empty apart from the Great Seal embossed on red wax at the base. Cadogan turned it over, checked the back, then held the parchment limply and stared blankly into space. Trilby, reading over Cadogan's shoulder, blinked slowly and tried to keep his face neutral in spite of his concern.

"A trick," said Trilby firmly after a pregnant pause. He was determined that whatever chance existed to restore sanity to the universe would be seized with both hands.

"Why do you say that, muggle?" said Corvus with impatience. "Look, there's your king's seal at the bottom. There's his writing. Why do you call this a trick?"

"Ah, technically, he's not my king. And seals and signatures can be faked."

"But what reason have you to doubt it?"

"Well, for one thing, it goes on about Sir Cadogan's appointment to a court of wizards." Trilby reached over Cadogan's shoulder and tapped a relevant sentence on the parchment. "And wizards don't exist."

"Don't exi..." Corvus spluttered, pointing wildly at the cooling corpse of the dragon behind Cadogan. "You just fought a damn _dragon__! _You can accept lizards that can breath fire and fly, but not in people favoured with the gift of magic? What sort of arbitrary scepticism is that?" Cadogan continued to make no comment, but his own face also betrayed scepticism.

"An entirely reasonable sort," said Trilby, with the sincerity of the truly desperate. "Dragons and wizards are different things. I've just seen a dragon, but that doesn't prove that magic or wizards exist. Simple logic."

"Look, you spattergroited mugg..." began Corvus hotly, before Hydra raised her wand and shot a look at her brother.

"Then how about a demonstration of magic? Will evidence of something indisputably magical convince you to hear us out?"

Cadogan looked up.

"Yes," he said quietly. "Yes, that's a good idea. That's fair."

"Very well," said Hydra, and, raising her wand, said "_Eudiconjuro_," quietly, whereupon a large bunch of fresh indigo-coloured roses appeared with a pop in mid-air.

Cadogan slowly took the roses out of the air and, holding the stalks with one hand, gently pulled off a petal and peered at it closely. He sniffed it, peered at it, bit into it gently, and then let it fall to the ground.

"Indisputably real," he said, in the same neutral manner, "And quite indisputably unexplainable, Trilby. Unless we turn to magic." He raised a brow at his purpling squire.

"Gck," said Trilby in the back of his throat. He looked at the flowers, then at the twins, then turned to stare at the dragon, then back to the flowers. He then brushed past Sir Cadogan, muttering "I'll get the horse." The twins and Cadogan watched him march off into the snow.

"Is your squire alright?" said Hydra, after a few moments and after Trilby was out of earshot.

"I imagine so," said Cadogan non-committally. "He's a good lad. Smart. Educated when I got him, and he, ah, tries to retain that education at all times." Cadogan shrugged with a smile. "Give him his credit, he's right most of the time. Just not for this." There was the sound of distant yelling as Cadogan examined the parchment once more. He looked up at Corvus and Hydra, his eyes set and cold.

"_What_ is this? What is this asking of me?"

"Whatever it says on the paper, we would presume," said Hydra. "We did not make ourselves privy to its contents. We were but asked to deliver it, and to then invite and escort you and your companions to Hogwarts."

"Hogwhat?"

"The school for all wizardry in Brittania, and the seat of true power," said Corvus with pride. "Consider yourself honoured to have been invited, muggle."

"I would prefer "Sir Cadogan" rather than "muggle", if you please," said Cadogan. "And this Hogwash place … can I find a coherent explanation for what's going on there? I believe my squire would greatly appreciate an explanation as well." Far off, Trilby's blurred form could be seen dragging the frightened pony's reins and loudly lecturing it on the impossibility of what he had just seen in accordance with known natural laws.

"Trilby," said Cadogan as the squire neared. "These people have offered to take us to a place where we might receive a rational explanation for what has just transpired. I intend to take them up on it. Do you approve of this course of action?"

"Yes a thousand-fold."

"Then ready yourselves, for we have ten miles to go before sunset," said Corvus. "We need to get to the Ironlith near here."

"The what?"

"A monument created by the wizards of old. There's a Portkey stationed there we can use." Sir Cadogan opened his mouth again, and Hydra sighed. "Sir knight, later I will answer all your questions to the best of my ability, I swear to Merlin. But there are pressing reasons why we have to move as quickly as possible."

"Why?"

"There's … oh, just get moving," she said irritably, waving her wand in the direction in the direction of the village stables, beckoning Trilby's laden pony out of its stall. Cadogan, as he moved past with Trilby to pack the ponies, didn't notice Hydra's look of concentration on the horizon, nor did he hear the short and hushed conversation between her and Corvus.

The two ponies were quickly prepared with some assistance from the twins, and they were soon bustled out on the road without so much as a by-your-leave from Corvus and Hydra. There were no shouts of farewell from the village as they left it, the squat timber houses stood silent and shuttered.

They took the west road, and snow renewed its descent as they walked. Corvus and Hydra took the lead ten metres ahead of Trilby and Cadogan, the two deep in hushed conversation. The only sounds were the whispering of the falling snow, the muffled clop-clop of the ponies along the snow-packed road, and the twin's discussion.

Trilby and Cadogan walked in silence.

"Trilby," hissed Sir Cadogan after an hour's journey along the road, "Get out one of your torches."

"Yes, sir," said Trilby, opening a bag that hung from his pony's side and retrieving, from a stash of several, a foot-length of thick wood covered with a wad of cloth and rope at one end. The scent of oil was still vaguely discernible on the torch.

"Hold it steady," said Cadogan quietly, reaching into a pouch at his belt and pulling out a flint and piece of steel. He held the flint and steel in each hand, positioned them close to the torch in Trilby's hand, and struck them against each other in one practised motion. A spark leapt from the steel and onto the torch head, loosing a burst of fire. Corvus and Hydra turned slightly at the noise and light, saw the torch, and thought little of it in the winter weather.

"Hold it even steadier, if possible. In fact, stop for a moment," whispered Cadogan, pulling out the rolled-up parchment from his pouch and unfurling it.

"What are you doing, sir?" said Trilby, puzzled.

"Remembering something I know nobles do," said Cadogan. "How much do you remember of your upbringing before I found you, lad?"

"Little enough of what I think you're referring to," said Trilby. "I was too young to remember most of it. But what does that have to do with the lett...?"

"When I fought the Mad Marquess," said Cadogan with concentration as he pulled off his gauntlets so as to keep a steadier grip on the parchment. "I remember that he liked to keep his messages and nature of his organisings hidden from all but those he trusted. So not only did he use a code in his letters, he also used invisible ink..."

"Ah, like onion juice, or honey solution, or vinegar," like Trilby with a burst of recollection. "Something that only becomes seen when you heat it."

"So it's a common trick, is it? That bodes well," said Cadogan, holding the parchment firmly but gently as he moved it slowly closer to the guttering flames.

For a brief moment there was no sign of change. But then the heat worked its magic on the parchment, and faded brown writing materialised as if by magic on the blank bottom half of the parchment.

"I thought wasting half a sheet of parchment was a bit suspicious," said Cadogan with satisfaction.

"Why are you stopping?" came the distant demand from Corvus, the twins having noticed that their charges had fallen behind. "We cannot afford delays."

"My pardon," called back Sir Cadogan loudly, "I felt an urge to stand and admire the snowfall." There was a distant mutter of aggravation, and Cadogan and Trilby started walking again as they stared transfixed at the new message.

Below _in the first year of our reign_, and above the Great Seal, the secret message read;

_To the recipient, whom upon uncovering this message has proven themselves of sufficient cunning for this confidential aspect of their duties._

_The knight errant Sir Cadogan shall, concurrent with the duties outlined above, shall remain ever alert for intrigue in the wizarding court. Should any plot be revealed that could affect the lawful governance of the realm or the natural order of life in the Brittanic Isles, then it shall be incumbent on Sir Cadogan to unmake any such plot and to kill, captivate, or destroy such persons or wizards whom are involved in the scheme._

_It shall be understood that such a duty will bear considerable risk, and we ordain that upon successful resolution of his duties at such a time we deem fit, Sir Cadogan shall be granted land in Banffshire to be held by himself and his heirs in perpetuity._

_Failure in the course of the above duty shall render Sir Cadogan an outlaw, to be hunted and punished forevermore on the grounds of high treason._

Sir Cadogan absently checked the back of the parchment once, on the off chance that writing had appeared there as well. Trilby groaned slightly as he finished reading.

"Damn it all," he said. "Not only is this breaking several fundamental views I held of the world, but now it has the temerity to get political. This must be a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays."

"It does lend a certain new aspect to affairs. I wonder what the Scottish king knows exactly of this," said Cadogan. "It seems like he's asking me to spy. And I have never seen spying as a knightly duty, to go along with a knight's honours."

Trilby stared for a moment at Cadogan face, still as unruffled and liable to grin wildly as it always did.

"May I ask a disrespectful question with as much respect as can be mustered, sir?"

"Go on, then."

"How the _hell_ are you taking this so well?" Trilby exploded, making Corvus and Hydra turn slightly. "I mean … I know you've always been slightly more prepared than me to believe in unbelievable things, like dragons, and … and witches when you heard that other rumour in a pub, and other things. But how can you still be so ambivalent when the things you run after do magic in front of you? How do you do that?"

"Because knights make it a duty to expect the unexpected," said Sir Cadogan calmly. "And because I always know what I'm doing, squire."

"That's _not_ a reason."

"It's a sort of reason."

The snow fell on. The wind howled. The torch was the only thing above body temperature for miles.

At one point, Corvus and Hydra motioned Trilby and Cadogan off the path, pointing towards something unseen on the north side of the road. Grumbling only slightly, the knight and squire changed direction and started hammering their way through the knee high levels of snow out of the ruts on the road.

The snow rose. The wind screamed far above, in the highest levels of the sky. Corvus and Hydra kept their gazes firmly forwards, at some far target only they could see.

And behind the group, half-hidden by snow, something the colour of blood twisted and flew on the air currents.

It saw the group. It saw the knight and squire. It saw the wizards at the front, and it focused on them.

Its eyes set into the gaze of a predator, and they turned and began to circle them.

On the ground, huddled beneath their cloaks (or half-cloak, in Cadogan's case) Trilby and Cadogan finally began to see what the wizards were aiming for. Beyond a bank of cloud, and through a haze of snow, and in the middle of an opening clearing, they could see …

"Is … is that a standing stone?" called out Trilby to the twins.

"Not quite," said Corvus with a chuckle.

The Ironlith became clearer and more distinct as they neared it, and it seemed very much like a standing stone. It rose vertically, a great pillar of mottled red stone some six metres high. There was something a bit familiar and off-putting about the rough red stone, however. Cadogan realised what it was, when he put the look of the substance and the name Hydra had mentioned together.

"That's not a standing stone," he said, after a while. "That's a standing _iron_."

"Oh, well _done_, sir," said Corvus, stopping at the Ironlith and leaning against it with a smirk playing on his features. "Yes, the ancient muggles were awfully proud of raising their stone circles and menhirs all over the place. We wizards went for something simpler, but no less impressive."

"Impressive," echoed Cadogan, staring up at the Ironlith. There must have been around fifty tons of iron in the damn thing when wizards first raised it. Less weighty now, of course, since it would now be bitten through with rust, but that didn't make it less of a feat.

What had he gotten himself into?, he wondered as he stopped before it next to the Malfoy twins, Trilby stopping a scant few paces behind him. Oh well. Too late to turn back now. And knights never retreated anyway.

"It's the stone with the blue mottling," said Hydra after a few minute's deliberation. "Now how this works, sir knight, is that this will transport us at great speed to the village of Hogsmeade, just outside Hogwarts. We'll all have to grasp it or each other at the same time for it to work, but that's as tricky as it gets. Any questions about this?"

"Not this, no."

"Good. Now, if you could stand over here..." Hydra motioned Cadogan and Trilby over to the stone, then stopped. There was a soft susurration from behind them, from the direction they had come. They turned as one, instantly wary.

On a stone at the edge of the clearing perched a great red bird. It was an eagle, its feathers gleaming with every shade of colour between rust and blood. Eyes as orange as volcanic amber and as cold as winter regarded the group, claws as cruel and black as night gripped the rock.

It stared down the group coolly as they turned, and then shifted to become a standing man, wrapped in cream-and-emerald robes, his head covered by a fur-lined hood. One hand drifted near the strap on his belt holding a wand.

"You two take the stone," hissed Corvus out of the side of his mouth. "Go ahead of us. Don't worry about us, another Portkey's been enchanted to shift places with this one as soon as it's been used. We'll handle this."

"Who is ..."

"Go." The order came taut and urgent. Sir Cadogan and Trilby moved closer to the stone on the ground.

Upon seeing two members of the group move closer to the Portkey, the strange man's hand moved innocently away from his wand.

"Now, Trilby," said Cadogan firmly, holding the reins of one pony in his hand, his eyes not leaving the man who was now striding closer to Corvus and Hydra. Trilby put his hand on Cadogan's shoulder hesitantly, his other hand holding the other pony.

Cadogan stooped down and paused with his hand over the Portkey. He saw Corvus and Hydra start moving forwards to the man.

Cadogan placed his hand on the Portkey, and something seemed to go _clic_k in the universe.

And just before everything abruptly whirled away in a rush of blurring motion, he saw Corvus and Hydra and the man meet, bow slightly at the waist to one another, and exchange polite greetings.


	6. The Affairs of Wizards

Blurring, motion, speed, dissolving, more motion, blind panic, screaming, blurring, shapes forming...

Something un-_click_ed in the universe, and the Portkey came to a stop. Cadogan kept the stone tight in his grasp, his nerves afray and eyes readjusting to solid surroundings. Behind him, Trilby slumped to the ground. The ponies looked around in equine bemusement.

By degrees, Cadogan let go of the stone, which clattered to the ground. To Cadogan's left, a Portkey in the form of a rusty tankard had the Counterlocation Charm on it activated, and it vanished with a crack and a flash to reappear next to the Ironlith.

Cadogan took a moment to look around. He was in an alcove in a low-ceilinged room, the walls made from pale pine timbers stained dark with soot. Straw covered a stone floor, and chairs and tables were spread across the wide room. Out of the alcove and to his left, a wooden door led to the outside. To his right, a fireplace flanked by murky glass windows sat in the wall. Directly across from him, a long wooden counter spread across the room. A short, wiry man stood behind the counter, polishing a mug with a dirty cloth. He looked up, and gave Sir Cadogan a snaggle-toothed grin. There was a stubby pine wand stuck into his belt.

"Welcome, good folk," he began, "To the Drunken Chimera, the finest tavern this side of the pearly gates. Whatever your poison, we've got it on tap here."

Cadogan walked out of the alcove, his gait still unsteady. Trilby slowly pulled himself up by the pony's reins.

"Er," began Sir Cadogan by way of introduction. "Is this Hogsmeade? Only the Malfoy twins said that was where we were meant to end up."

"Of course this is Hogsmeade," said the tavernkeep, giving Cadogan a funny look. "Haven't you heard of the place before? I'd have thought a friend of the Malfoys would've heard of it."

"I haven't," said Cadogan tersely, while Trilby pulled himself to his feet and stared at his surroundings. "Neither myself nor my squire have encountered anything to do with wizardry until earlier today."

"You haven't..." The tavernkeep looked askance at the pair until realisation dawned. "Wait, there was a rumour going around that the Headmistress of Hogwarts had made a deal to keep a muggle knight at the school. You aren't that knight, are you?"

"I am a knight, I can confirm that much," said Sir Cadogan. "I don't know about being retained by some headmistress."

The tavernkeep grinned and spat into his palm and held it out.

"Apologies for the confusion there, sir," he said. "Joshua Lanigan, by way of Coventry. Muggle-born. Can I offer first-timers like yourselves a drink on the house?"

"Yes, please," said Trilby, moving out of the alcove with much increased rapidity. He grasped Joshua's outstretched hand and shook it firmly. "I'm Trilby, squire to Sir Cadogan here."

"Pleased to meet you both. How does Firewhisky sound?"

"Never heard of it. Sounds wonderful."

Joshua busied himself pouring a pair of Firewhiskies, while Trilby and Sir Cadogan seated themselves at the counter with some satisfaction. The ponies started placidly grazing on the straw covering the tavern floor.

"You have made an ally today, sir," said Trilby to Joshua as he sipped from his small mug of gold-speckled amber fluid. "Ye gods, this is good stuff."

"I make a lot of allies that way, my lad. And you're right in that it's good stuff. Specially distilled from malted barley and salamander guts."

Trilby sipped at the liquid, having mercifully missed the last part, while Sir Cadogan downed his own measure in one movement. He wiped his mouth and said "You mentioned you were 'Muggle-born' earlier. What does that mean?"

"Hmm? Oh, that's just how the wizards define things. _Us_ wizards, rather." Joshua spat at the fireplace some metres away, and hit the flames with a sizzle and spark. "Defines how you were born. I'm muggle-born, so that means both my mum and dad were muggles, but I wasn't. I was born with the ability to do magic, and blessed if I could tell you why. Pure-bloods are born into a family that's supposedly been manifesting magic since time immemorial. Half-bloods have a muggle parent and a pure-blood parent. Pretty simple."

Cadogan stared into his empty mug. "There's entire families of wizards?"

"Oh, yes. Hundreds, some more powerful than others, and nearly all proud pure-bloods. Squabbling over power and land and artifacts, like the muggle lords. The Malfoy's you mentioned, they're one of the more powerful ones. The Headmistress at the moment's a Canmore. They're not as great in the overall game, or at least they weren't before she became Headmistress. And there's plenty more powerful families that dominate wizarding politics. The Weasley's, the Greengrass's, the Black's, the Parkinson's, the Torque's, the Prewett's, to name but a few."

"And there's some that're more powerful than all of them."

* * *

Corvus and Hydra stopped before the figure, and bowed slightly at the waist, as was simple good manners between members of the old families.

"Corvus. Hydra." The man's voice was melodious and deep, if muffled slightly by the thick hood he wore. "What a pleasant surprise to meet you two out here. I imagined I was the only one near the Ironlith today."

"It's entirely our pleasure," said Hydra carefully, raising her head as the man pulled back his hood and uncovered his head. "Lord Gaunt."

Nachlan Gaunt smiled pleasantly back at Hydra. He was a handsome and well-built man, with large, bright brown eyes and an easy smile that came naturally to his face. An unruly head of auburn hair framed strong features and a smooth, clean-shaven face, marred only by a faint line of scarring extending from the right edge of his mouth to the bottom of his right ear.

He was the undisputed head of House Gaunt, the noble descendants of Salazar Slytherin, and the most influential and dreaded wizard in the British Isles.

"Please, call me Nachlan. We can split the pleasure on this, so as to compromise," he said with a chuckle. "Tell me, what business draws you out here?"

Corvus and Hydra hesitated a moment, caught in the full gaze from the bright eyes and bright smile. It was easy to fall for Nachlan Gaunt's charm. Perilously easy.

"We're on official business for Katelyn Canmore," said Corvus quickly and with an eager, nervous smile. "Confidential business on her behalf. I'm sure you understand."

"Involving the pair I saw use the Portkey?" Gaunt's smile was as bright as ever, but something cold lurked behind the question and his gaze. "Come now, you can tell me. Whatever Lady Canmore wishes to keep confidential, I will as well."

"Tut, Nachlan," laughed Hydra suddenly, nervously, recklessly. "Would you ask us to betray Lady Canmore's secrets?"

"It's a trifling errand, of no account," interjected Corvus. "A _personal_ affair for Lady Canmore, I'm sure."

For a long second, there was no sound but the whisper of snow across the sky. Hydra and Corvus stood ready and alert. Nachlan stood perfectly still, his face set, his eyes cold.

"Very well," he said with a sudden laugh, returning the meeting to life. "I shan't press you on your business. Nor shall I delay you about it. Take care, you two." He bowed and turned, then turned back briefly.

"If you're returning to Lady Canmore, then would you do me the favour of informing her that I may pay her a social call during the Christmas holidays? I wouldn't want to startle her."

"We'll be sure to inform her."

"Oh, and do give your father my fondest regards. I trust his health shall return to him soon."

He smiled and stepped away, and Apparated into nothingness.

Hydra and Corvus breathed out.

"Hells on a stick," said Corvus hotly after he had regained his composure. "That was entirely too close. That damned lunatic mustn't … mustn't … _how much did he know?_"

"'Give your father my fondest regards'," repeated Hydra softly. "Bastard. How dare he taunt us with that? How dare he pretend concern? How dare he pretend bloody _innocence?_"

They stood silent and ashamed and seething in the snow, under the shadow of Gaunt and the Ironlith both.

"If he found out about the knight, then the knight had best make his peace with his maker," said Corvus. "Gaunt's wrath isn't a fate I'd wish on anyone, even a muggle."

"He'll find out in time," said Hydra grimly. "We should make sure Katelyn knows that the knight's at risk. And we'll warn her about his 'social call'."

"How did he even know we were here?" said Corvus, as they walked to the materialised tankard. "Gods. Does he have agents of his own? I'd hoped we were the only ones making use of spies."

"You're an incurable optimist, I've always thought," said Hydra, reaching down for the tankard.

* * *

"Why would the pure-bloods dislike muggle-borns?" said Trilby, finishing his second shot. The conversation had moved on from Sir Cadogan's questions about the wizarding families, and Trilby had taken the helm.

Joshua shrugged in response.

"Why does any group hate any other group? Whatever their personal reasons, it nearly always boils down to hating half-bloods, loathing muggle-borns, and treating muggles no better than vermin. Of course, that's only the attitude you'll find amongst some of the pure-blood families, and even then only a few'll turn that into outright violence."

The conversation about blood status amongst wizards, while illuminating to Trilby, didn't ease his growing concerns that Sir Cadogan might not be entirely prepared for this dangerous new world of sorcery and politics.

There was the cheering thought that the wizarding world wouldn't be entirely prepared for Sir Cadogan either, Trilby supposed.

"And don't get me wrong, a lot of the pure-blood families are decent folk. The Weasley's, they're a good bunch. The Malfoy's you're hanging around with are as proud as lions about their blood purity, but they're honourable for it. As for..."

There was a whooshing sound behind them at that moment, and Corvus and Hydra appeared in the alcove.

"Speak of the devils," said Joshua lightly.

"We dealt with it," said Corvus, brushing imaginary dust of his robe. "Time we saw you safe to Hogwarts, sir."

"Already?" said the knight. He stood up off his chair and tugged at Trilby's shoulder. "Come on, lad. And thank you for the drink and conversation, Joshua. I hope we'll meet again."

"The same to you, sir. But I'll be charging for the drink next time."

They stepped out into Hogsmeade proper, dragging the reluctant pony behind them, which had been quite enjoying the warm confines and plentiful straw. Outside, the cold wind hit them like a slap across the face. The tall timber buildings around them were frosted over with snow, and footsteps and sleigh-treads had ground pathways into the wide streets.

As they walked through the village, led by the Malfoy twins, Trilby and Cadogan found themselves glancing at the buildings around them. They seemed richer and more ornate than most muggle houses, and through the glass windows (another marvel to the pair, who had hitherto only seen this much glass used in churches) they could see signs of household life combined with something extraordinary. Broomsticks swept the floor of their own volition, small elfin creatures swept and scrubbed and scoured, and the odd glimpsed paintings seemed almost to move in their frames.

"Goodness," said Cadogan at that last sight, much impressed.

"What is it?" said Hydra.

"I believe I just saw a painting in that house move."

"It's a new technique, with specially enchanted paints and canvas. Still a little rough around the edges, but still impressive. Ah, here we are." They stopped before a large wooden sleigh with a closed top, carved with images of leprechauns and dancing satyrs, some of which leered at Sir Cadogan as he stepped closer. At the front stood two great skeletal horses, with great black bat-like wings sprouting from their backs.

"Climb in," ordered Corvus. Cadogan tugged at the frozen door, and Trilby stared at the winged horses. "Don't worry about your ponies. They'll be attended to, and your belongings will be sent up later."

"It's not the ponies I'm worried about. What in Christ's name are _these_?"

"Them? They're Thestrals," said Corvus, walking closer to the beasts and patting one affectionately on its reptilian snout. "And they're particularly well-trained and good-natured. Aren't you, you lovely monstrosity?"

"_Kwwaaaark,_" said the lovely monstrosity, flapping its wings impatiently. Trilby backed through the open sleigh door, out of the cold and away from the Thestrals, sitting himself next to Cadogan on the leather-lined wooden seats inside. Corvus and Hydra clambered in after them, seating themselves on the chairs across from Cadogan and Trilby. Corvus made a clickign noise in the back of his throat, and the door automatically swung shut as the Thestrals cantered forward.

The first few minutes of the journey passed in silence. Cadogan looked outside the glass window set into the door at the passing landscape; at the lines of timber houses along the road, at the occasional person out on the streets, at the trees and snowy vistas that soon replaced the village. The weedy rays of sunlight that peeked through patches between the slate-grey clouds grew dimmer by the minute as evening crept closer.

"Pardon me for asking, but how many wizards live in Hogsmeade?" he said, after they passed the last outlying home and began trundling up a forest road.

"Well," said Hydra after a askance glance and a moment's musing, "It's the seat for three noble families; the Torque's, the Prince's, and the Prewett's. It's also the home for their banner houses, servants and menials, outlying retainers, and sundry muggle-borns and half-blood bastards. Maybe about three hundred, in total. I beg your pardon, much of that must have been incomprehensible to you."

"Not all. The tavernkeep back in the Drunken Chimera was kind enough to give us a brief rundown of wizarding society and structure. If we're going to be ambassadors, then it would seem to be necessary knowledge."

"I see," said Hydra, exchanging a brief look with her brother. " How much did he tell you, exactly?"

"Just about the importance you place on blood, some of the noble families, and some long-running animosities between pure-bloods and other-bloods." Cadogan gave the twins a searching look. "Elementary information, nothing too advanced."

"There'd be a lot less animosity if that damn muggle-born knew when to keep his mouth shut," muttered Corvus.

"Sir knight?" said Hydra pleasantly, leaning across the compartment and closer to Sir Cadogan. "Would you accept some friendly advice?"

"Certainly, if ..."

She jabbed out with one finger hard at his throat, rapping against his steel gorget with enough force to shove him backwards into the padding. "Do _not_ take an undue interest in our politics, no matter what you imagine your duties to be. There are things more important than the whims and bluster of some up-jumped muggle with a crown on their head and you threaten to meddle with them. You cannot be trusted with the full scope of the situation besetting wizardry at this time, or indeed any facet of it. You are expected to do nothing more than keep quiet, stay out of the way, and remain damn well circumspect. Do you understand?"

Sir Cadogan's face mottled. "I am not accustomed to being ..."

"Grow accustomed," said Hydra, her earlier courtesy evaporated like morning mist, her face taut with anger and nearly-hidden fear. "You have the fortune to be a non-entity in our world. For your sake and for ours, see you remain as such."

Trilby was fascinated, in spite of himself, by this almost-textbook example of how not to handle Sir Cadogan.

Then, to his surprise, the knight inclined his head respectfully and said "Of course, Lady Hydra, I shall stay discreet and cautious if behaving otherwise may disrupt whatever is going on amongst wizards."

"I … that's good to hear," said the partially mollified Hydra. "You may be a very competent muggle amongst muggles, no doubt, but you would find yourself out of your depth in our world. I'm glad you see sense." Corvus nodded, looking relieved.

Cadogan kept his head inclined, with the most implausibly respectful look of subservience on his face Trilby had ever seen. The squire fought to keep his own face straight as he realised the knight was playing along with the twins to his own advantage.

"I beg your pardons," said Cadogan, his tone still level and peaceful, "But may I ask for the barest outline of the situation you're referring to? So I can avoid it, you inderstand, and not risk blundering across it?"

There was an imperceptible glance between the twins. An arched brow here, a slight nod there, and a definitive set of the brow elsewhere spoke volumes.

Hydra turned back to Sir Cadogan.

"If you feel it necessary in order to remain apart, then we'll give you the barest outline of what's going on," she said. "Wizarding Britain is on the brink of civil war."

"There are two factions emerging," said Corvus. "Each opposed to the other, and we belong to one of them, for reasons which are our own."

"You don't need to know any more about the conflict, save that it shall be resolved peacefully in due course, and that the Headmistress rules one of the factions and the head of one of the most powerful families the other. Merely stay silent, only speak to a family lord if you are spoken to, and avoid centre stage, and you shall have no part to play," said Hydra.

"I understand," said Sir Cadogan. "I'll keep my head down. As will my squire. Won't you, Trilby?"

"Oh, er, of course, sir," said Trilby hurriedly.

"Good," said Hydra with a smile, sitting back in her seat. "Please, don't concern yourself with it unnecessarily. It'll be resolved soon enough." She absent-mindedly glanced out of the window to her right. "You can see Hogwarts above the treeline now."

Trilby and Cadogan bent around to look out the window and saw, set against the dark blue-gray of the evening sky and atop the black jagged line of pine tree tops, distant towers and pointed turrets stabbing up into the sky.

They rounded one more bend in the road, and set upon the path leading directly up to the castle. Trilby and Cadogan opened a window each, and craned out to see the school for the first time.

It was huge, a massive stone structure greater by far than any of the other castles Cadogan and Trilby between them had seen before. The great buildings, connected by stone walkways and surrounding and connected to the central keep, were packed with protuding towers and gargoyles and plinths. The greatest tower, a keep in its own right, was set with a huge clock face, the chimes of which were audible far around. Every part of the castle speckled with light in the dark evening. To its south, a vast expanse of lake glimmered black under the stars, and the grounds were surrounded by a dark forest.

"Three hundred years of history have made it what it is," said Corvus with indisguisable pride. "Can muggles boast of anything so grand?"

"Not that I know of," said Cadogan, rapt by the sight. A castle was more than a fort of stone, it was the home of a lord. The greater the castle, the greater the power reflected on the lord within. The scale of the structure before him was as clear a statement of authority as Cadogan had ever seen. _Here we stand_, it said on behalf of wizardry, _and here we rule. _Could muggles boast of anything as big as Hogwarts? Could they hell.

Mind you, the sight gave Cadogan a certain degree of cold comfort. Wizards, it seemed were no different from normal people. They too felt the need to announce "Mine's bigger than yours." Overcompensating? Possibly. Perfectly normal? Of course.

"What are you smiling at?" said Corvus.

"Merely thinking of something relevant someone told me earlier," said Cadogan. "Tell me, a castle here would stick out like a sore thumb, especially one of this size. How has this been kept hidden?"

"Ancient spells and incantations wrought by the Founders themselves," said Hydra. "No muggle can find the castle unless a wizard wishes them to."

"I see," said Cadogan. So they deliberately kept themselves hidden, did they? Interesting.

The carriage trundled on, finally alighting in a courtyard before the main entrance. Huge oak doors loomed taller than three men, and the grey battlements above them loomed higher still. Corvus and Hydra got out first, followed by Cadogan and Trilby. As they got out, Corvus clicked in his throat at the Thestrals, who were freed from the harness connecting them to the carriage and happily trotted off.

Hydra stepped before the great doors and said, in a loud and authoritative tone, "Hydra and Corvus, of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Malfoy, beg leave to enter and deliver Headmistress Canmore's guests."

The door swung ponderously open, revealing a large entrance hall paved with soft golden marble. Staircase and doors wound off from it into the innards of Hogwarts, and the Malfoy twins strode towards a set of double doors on the right. Cadogan and Trilby followed, mute at the sights adorning the walls. Suits of armour stood at guard, gleaming and immaculate, the work of a hundred armourers over countless years judging by their number and quality. Portraits were scattered here and there, their occupants regarding the visitors with curiosity and suspicion in equal amounts. Torch brackets blazed with rainbow-coloured flames. Two gargoyles squatted on the banisters of the largest staircase, and leered at Trilby as he passed. Corvus paid the sights no heed, having seen them a hundred times before, and merely opened the double doors with one shove.

The Great Hall was all that, and more.

The adorned walls stretched to a distant podium, on which was set a long table, behind which was set the largest window Cadogan had ever seen outwith a cathedral. Four other long tables stretched the length of the hall, each one packed with chairs. The ceiling was impossibly distant and impossibly enchanted, and reflected perfectly the brooding dark sky without.

A few figures were sitting at the far ends of the four tables, small figures in dark robes who looked up curiously at the group's entry. The table at the back before the great window was also held by a few figures.

The twins took the lead, striding up the length between the two central tables, ignoring the looks they got from the black-robed figures, who were revealed to be children as Cadogan and Trilby drew nearer. The youngest could have been barely eleven, the oldest less than sixteen, and there couldn't have been more than a score of them. They were an even mix of boys and girls, and their robes were edged with red, blue, green, or yellow depending on the table at which they sat. Some of them looked at the Malfoy twins with clear recognition, and others regarded Sir Cadogan with naked confusion. One of them, a girl of about sixteen with blue-edged robes and a stong jaw, gave the muggles an especialy piercing look.

At the head table were seated adults, in more diverse clothing than the children. At the centre of the table, a seat more like a throne than a chair held a dark-eyed woman wearing robes of the deepest blue. She stood up as the twins approached, and bowed respectfully at the waist, which they returned.

"My fondest greetings to the House of Malfoy," the woman, presumably the Headmistress, said. "I see ye have returned with the knight. Such service shall not be forgotten."

"Such service is the least we can render," said Hydra smoothly.

"Let me invite ye two to my table, at least. Ye must have had a long and wearying journey."

"We would happily stay to do homage to your hospitality," said Corvus politely, "But I fear we must decline. There are … ah … matters we must see to at home. If we could have your leave..."

"Of course, don't let me delay ye two," said Headmistress Canmore, "And know that my door shall always be open whenever ye are in need of it."

"Before we leave," said Hydra carefully, "We were approached by Lord Gaunt along the route. He wishes to pay a social visit to Hogwarts later in the holidays."

"I see," said the headmistress after a moment's hesitation. "Then I should only be too pleased to receive him. Thank you for informing me."

The Malfoy twins bowed once more, then swept away down the hall and past Cadogan and Trilby with a flap of cloaks, leaving them exposed in front of the head table. The teachers of Hogwarts craned their heads to get a good look at the muggles.

"My greetings to ye in turn, Sir Cadogan, and to your squire as well," said the headmistress courteously. "I am Katelyn Canmore, Headmistress of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I appreciate ye have come very far, and away from what ye would normally call home. Rest assured that your stay here shall be made as comfortable as possible. Can I take it that ye ken the purpose of your appointment?"

"Serving as a representative from muggles to wizardry on behalf of the Scottish Crown," said Cadogan. "And I appreciate your warm welcome, my lady."

"Please, take a seat at my table." She motioned at two empty chairs next to her, and Cadogan and Trilby walked around the table after a moment's hesitation to take the seats. They sat themselves down, and regarded the heaped platters of food before them with hunger.

"Help yourselves," said Katelyn, "And let me introduce you to my staff. We're a wee bit shorthanded on pupils and teachers both – Christmas holdidays, ye ken – but there's still enough of us here. This is Cuthbert Binns, our new History of Magic teacher," - a young, freshfaced man with a shiny bald head nodded eagerly at Sir Cadogan - "This is Harold Dresden, our Transfiguration Professor," - a tall, stony-faced man nodded - "Markus Oshiro, for Care of Magical Creatures" - a wiry and tanned man with a trimmed beard and shaven head smiled and nodded - "And our Charms Professor, Oscar Diggory." The last man to her right gave Cadogan and Trilby a cursory glance and turned back to his meal. "There would've been my personal assistant, Mr Dunbar, here as well, but he seems to have vanished on us. We've a' been expecting your arrival with great anticipation."

Cadogan helped himself from a platter of rabbit stew and from dishes of turnips and beans and barley, a mere sample from the dozens of dishes filling the table, ladling the food into the trencher of stale bread in front of him. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen food of this quantity and quality. And how did they keep it warm after it was taken from the kitchens? How big did their kitchens have to be for this quantity of food in any case? Trilby shared his wonder.

"What do you think of our fine school so far?" said the History teacher, Binns, in an eager attempt at conversation.

Cadogan considered the question as he wiped grease off his moustache.

"It's certainly out of the ordinary," he said, and reached for another leg of rabbit.


	7. By the Pricking of My Thumbs

"There would've been my personal assistant, Mr Dunbar, here as well, but he seems to have vanished on us," said Katelyn Canmore as dusk fell over Hogwarts.

At that same moment, Hadrian Dunbar would have been found many miles to the southwest, in the captivity of her enemies.

He and his captor were beside a loch, the surface of which gleamed golden and black under the setting sun and dark sky. They were in a meadow by the waterside, which was covered with the merest sprinkling of snow. Tough, wiry grass and even a few tenacious flowers bloomed underfoot.

He was forced to kneel, his feet bound together and his hands tied behind his back. His pale blond hair was plastered against his skull with dried blood, his eyes were bloodshot and fearful, his grey robes were tattered and burned.

His captor towered above him, and would have done so even had he stood upright. She was a tall, rangy woman, with a head of long, matted, black hair that fell below her back. Her face was sharp and angular and scarred, her eyes burned with a feverish amber light, her nails were as sharp and yellow as her prominent canines. Her only garment was a shift of leather and fur that fell to her knees, leaving her arms bare.

Every time Hadrian whimpered, she hissed a rebuke. Every time he tried to speak, she lashed out with her claw-like nails and sent him reeling. If he looked like he planned to escape, she growled a rebuke. He stayed still.

As the sun neared the final border of cloud against the horizon, there was a crack behind them, and the woman turned to see Nachlan Gaunt. He stepped briskly forward as soon as he appeared, his gaze set on Hadrian.

"Has he been any trouble?" asked Gaunt of the woman.

"No," she said simply. "Nothing uncontrollable."

"That's good," said Gaunt. "I wouldn't want him to make unnecessary trouble for you." Hadrian, hearing another voice, twisted frantically and saw Gaunt.

"Lord Gaunt," he gasped between blood-caked lips. "Please help. This brigand has waylaid and assaulted me, she threatens to..." and he screamed as the woman span and dashed him to the ground with one precise blow from a fist. Hadrian sprawled and spat blood and a broken tooth, and stared upwards at Gaunt. He saw that handsome face, those bright brown eyes, that terrible extended smile. Except that only the scar was set in a smile. The rest of Gaunt's face showed only a chilly contempt.

"Do not presume to speak when you are not spoken to, half-blood," Gaunt said curtly, and then turned back to the woman. "I shall need to interrogate him, Skadi. But once I am finished, you may attend to your own affairs. Am I understood?" The woman, Skadi, nodded. Gaunt turned back to the cringing Hadrian.

"I have some questions to ask you regarding Headmistress Canmore's recent activities," said Gaunt, fixing Hadrian with a look normally reserved for errant excreta on the sole of one's shoe. "You are her personal assistant. I will expect true and complete answers. You will not lie, or I will hurt you. Nod if you understand."

Hadrian frantically nodded. "Yes, my lord, please don't..."

"Do not presume to speak unless I order you to do so, scum. Nod if you understand."

Hadrian nodded frantically.

"Good. And on my honour as a Gaunt, I shall free you and deliver you back to Hogwarts alive and unharmed once this is over." Gaunt reached out casually for a length of wood that lay discarded on the grass, and held it up and span it between his fingers, stopping when it was angled down at Hadrian. "This is your wand, I take it?"

Hadrian nodded.

"Hmm." Gaunt thought for a moment, then spoke his first question in a measured and easy tone. "Tell me, Hadrian, when the muggles pushed another muggle slightly higher up the dungheap they call a society by giving it a crown, did Headmistress Canmore go through the usual motions of unveiling the Masquerade for the muggle in question? You may respond verbally for these questions."

Hadrian nodded eagerly and spoke quickly, his voice cracked and harsh. "Yes, Lord Gaunt. She performed the usual greetings to the muggle king and queen."

"And was this a perfectly normal meeting? Did she drop in, inform them, drop out, and have done with that? No other business done?"

Hadrian hesitated before responding. "Yes, Lord Gaunt. Everything went as normal."

Gaunt nodded and twirled the wand thoughtfully. Then, quietly, "You're lying, half-blood. _Crucio_."

Hadrian doubled over and fell prostrate onto the ground, screaming and writhing and shrieking and twisting as invisible knives slashed at every nerve across his body. Pain such as he had never felt blotted out his world, made thought impossible, made his universe a dark and ever-constricting ball of agony.

It burned forever, and then it was gone, leaving agonising aftermath throughout his body and soul. He groaned weakly, unable to process what Gaunt had just done to him with his own wand.

"If you lie to me again," he heard Gaunt say, "Then I shall do that again. I have other, cruder and no less effective methods. Shall I be forced to use them?"

No sane wizard would do that to another wizard, knowing what it did, thought Hadrian. A wizard wouldn't do that. A mad dog wouldn't do that. And Gaunt had just done it. Nachlan Gaunt, the Heir of Slytherin, Gaunt Half-a-Smile, the not-so-hidden enemy of Katelyn Canmore and sworn foe of the Masquerade, stared at Hadrian with cruel amusement and held the wand, perfectly ready to do it again.

"You … shan't be forced to use them." Hadrian's voice was a choke on the edge of audibility.

"Earlier today, I saw the Malfoy twins at the Ironlith. They had what looked like two muggles in tow. What business took place between Canmore and the muggle king? What does it have to do with the Malfoy twins and the muggles?"

"It … when she met with the muggle king and queen, they requested that a representative of their people be stationed at Hogwarts. To act as a go-between..."

"A muggle at Hogwarts?" Gaunt's lip curled. "Desecration. Bad enough that she allows Mudbloods, worse still that that prospect even be considered. She surely refused?"

"There was … I think the muggles strong-armed her. They threatened war on wizardry and she appeased them. There could be no harm in it, she had no interest in waging another war with muggles as well as with you..." Hadrian shut up a few words too late. Gaunt's face was unreadable.

"She considers me equatable to muggles?" he said in a voice that was tranquil in its fury. "She dares consider me an enemy to wizardry? She … I will not waste words on you. But she is mistaken." He shook off the brief spasm of rage that crossed his face, and became neutral and composed once more. "So the good Headmistress permitted a muggle access to Hogwarts. Where did the Malfoy twins come into this?"

"I suggested they be dispatched to retrieve the muggle in question. He was a wandering knight, hard to find."

At the mention of the Malfoys, something that could have been … regret? … stole over Gaunt's face, and was replaced with a look of contempt he threw at Hadrian.

"I see. If what you've told me is true, then the muggle is already warming his heels in the home of wizardry. Like a blind, rancid animal, fouling the halls of its betters. An animal you helped bring in, half-blood." He sighed. "I have heard enough. I have no more questions."

"Then can … can I go?"

"Hmm?" said Gaunt, broken from a short reverie.

"You swore on your honour on a Gaunt that you'd let me go once you were done." A high note of terror entered Hadrian's voice. "You swore!"

Gaunt smiled then, a full and genuine smile that burst across his face like a sunbeam. "My father once told me that promises made to blood-bastards and blood traitors were like promises made to air." Hadrian stared in panicked bewilderment so Gaunt clarified with a chuckle. "Worthless. Baseless. Voiceless. What right do the likes of you have to a portion of pure-blood honour?" He turned his back and stepped away, dismissing Hadrian with a wave. "Do with him as you will, Skadi. A Gaunt honours his debts to the worthy." Skadi advanced with a feral and wild grin.

Hadrian was not a naturally brave or foolhardy man, and being trapped between an unstable madman and a woman who had the rank of a wolf about her did his moral fibre no favours. But he had principles, based on an obligation to Katelyn Canmore. And even a cornered rat can still turn and fight, or at least make one last bid for freedom.

His eyes drifted to the wand in Gaunt's grasp, held casually behind his back. He sized up the threat posed by Skadi, which could be considerable. He tried to breath normally, to manifest the wandless magic necessary to slip off his bonds and to Apparate away.

He watched Nachlan Gaunt's back, who imperceptibly spun the wand between his fingers in anticipation.

Hadrian sprung and Gaunt struck. The small grey man leapt loose from suddenly loosened bonds and seized for his wand in Gaunt's grasp. Gaunt side-stepped his stumbling grab with ease, sweeping aside as Hadrian stumbled past. Gaunt brandished Hadrian's wand in his left hand at the same moment as his own wand flew into his right hand, and he angled the two wands at Hadrian's legs and hissed "_Diffindo._"

Two bursts of light flashed from the two wands and Hadrian fell forwards, hamstrung and bleeding. Before he could scream, Gaunt dropped Hadrian's wand and said, in the same breath, keeping his own wand leveled, "_Petrificus Totalus._"

Hadrian lay still, frozen but for his eyes which rolled in blind panic. Behind him, Gaunt glanced down at Hadrian's wand, and broke it in half with one stamp of his foot.

"A spirited attempt," said the woman in a guttural voice. "Desperation and passion in the last moments of life makes for a better offering to the All-Father."

"Then make it while he lasts," came Gaunt's sneering voice. "He can hear everything we say. The Body-Binding Curse is unparalleled for letting you get the measure of an enemy, I find. They nearly all die in terror. Only the mad face me with no fear, and they don't deserve to live in the first place." A foot hooked around Hadrian's frozen side and flipped him over onto his back. Gaunt's face rose into view. His eyes were narrowed, his mouth was taut and spiteful.

"You'll be of use to me yet before the end, blood bastard," said Gaunt. "Have you been introduced to my companion? This is Skadi Ulfsdottor, Doyenne and Alpha of the werewolves of Norway." The woman showed a mouth of sharpened, yellowing teeth, and Hadrian moaned faintly in fear.

"She had graciously come to Britain at my invitation, with a full pack of her brightest and fiercest, to help bring ruin to those who would deny the cause of pure-blood supremacy. And she and her pack will be well rewarded once I have reclaimed the rightful place of wizards. However, before she can begin her work proper, these isles must be consecrated and dedicated to her gods. The _old_ gods. As old as blood and stone and winter itself."

"Fear not your death," said the woman in a surprisingly soft tone as Hadrian's eyes rolled in fear and realisation. "For by your death, you shall leave this land a proper hunting ground." She patted the handles of the long knife and spruce wand that dangled from a piece of twine wound around her waist.

"I can see you two shall get along famously," said Gaunt. "I shall contact you later, Skadi, after you are finished here. We shall set about undoing this affront to wizardry."

He stepped away, and Apparated away.

"This daughter of Great Fenris sends her prayers and call to the gods," breathed Skadi, stepping closer to Hadrian. "Great Woden, Gallows-God and All-Father, know that I send to you my lust for battle and victory. Take this life given to you, so that I and my kin may know true war in the nights to come."

The knife rose. It shone silver and wicked in the dying light. Hadrian had no voice in which to scream.

"And know that even as you are Fenris's foe, his children honour you as an opponent, and devote this ritual and life for your favour. Woden means war. Woden means madness. Woden means death."

Her last intonation was barely more than a breathy whisper. "_Woden means victory._"

The knife descended as her wand came out. Hadrian died in terror and pain.

Once she was done, she hung his body with a makeshift noose from a branch overhanging the loch, as a final devotion to Woden, and left it there as she Apparated away to rejoin her pack. The body would remain there until it rotted and fell apart.

Storm clouds gathered over Scotland as night set in.


	8. Acclimatization, Pt 1

Wakefulness came by degrees for Sir Cadogan; starting with a brief awakening shrouded by drowsiness when weedy rays of sunlight first began to fall across his face, continuing with a gradually growing awareness of the world around him when he went through the usual philosophical questions that occur to the recently risen (who am I, where am I physically, where am I in the overall trajectory of my life, why does my mouth taste like something evil died inside it?) and concluded when he slowly pulled himself off of the soft wool mattress on which he had spent the night.

He groaned and yawned as he stood in his braies, blinking blearily as he scanned his surroundings and memory of the previous day's events stole back upon him.

The Headmistress, after they had finished their meal last night, had kindly offered accommodation to Cadogan and Trilby. The accommodation had turned out to be a small stone cottage outwith the school, at the edge of a clearing at the end of a long wooden walkway, from which a gentle slope ran down to the lake they had seen last night. The building itself was low-ceilinged and small, with two rooms each containing a bed and a central room containing a hearth and table and chairs. The warmth from the fire lit in the hearth had somehow spread evenly across the whole building, and still lingered in the morning.

The memories came roaring back in a deluge, and were then abruptly dammed by the force of Cadogan's morning ritual. First, he would have a drink of water. Then, he would brush his teeth with salt and soot. Then, allowing for a nearby body of water, he would have a swim. The memories would only be allowed to seep back in a controllable quantity, one sanity-preserving part at a time.

After drinking from a tub of cool water in the central room and using a ready platter of salt and soot, he strode off down the snow-dusted slope to the cool expanse of grey water. He paused only to take off his braies before plunging into the lake, relishing the freezing water.

A few tranquil moments passed, with only the odd splash from the surfacing Cadogan breaking the peace.

Then there was an abrupt disturbance when Cadogan's swim concluded in yelling and frantic splashing and a hurried frontcrawl back to the shore. He scrabbled back on the grass hurriedly, pulled his braies back on, and cursed blue murder at the lake before walking haughtily back to the cottage.

"Morning, sir," said the bleary Trilby, who was sort-of-awake and sitting at the table in the central room by the time Cadogan returned. "Did you have a nice swim?"

"You'd think," began Sir Cadogan, drawing on deep reserves of wounded pride, "That they'd take the bother to inform us, before accommodating us next to a lake, that we'd be sharing said lake with a bloody _kraken_."

"What?"

"Some enormous damn thing with eyes like saucers and tentacles the length of lances lives in that lake, and from now on, I'm sticking to the shallow bits." Cadogan snorted. "Didn't try to hurt me, mind you. Didn't seem aggressive. But it's a little offputting when some monstrosity from the abyssal depths tries to give you a _cuddle_."

"What?" repeated Trilby. He had no morning ritual such as Sir Cadogan's to protect him from the events of yesterday, doubled with the usual fog-inducing nature of early mornings. He was a little out of sorts.

"Never mind. I'm going to get dressed. See what there is in the pantry here." Cadogan strode off into his room.

There was another novelty. A whole room to oneself was rare unless you paid for one in an inn, and Cadogan disliked spending on frivolous things like that. But he confessed he liked the privacy of it, and also appreciated the furnishings. A good bed with a wool-stuffed mattress. A cupboard for his few belongings. A chest for his underclothes. A stand for his weapons, and another for his armour. He walked to this last one now, and stopped short.

The armour had been cleaned up by some unseen visitor. Every patch and spot of rust on the plates and mail had been scoured, every dent had been filled, every rent had been mended; until the armour shone like it had been newly forged. Even the crimson half-cloak at its back had been restored with good quality cloth. It was a thoughtful touch.

He picked up his greathelm, which had been given a new red plume, and tried to remember the last time it had been clear enough to show his reflection. He put the helm aside with a grin, and dressed.

Some ten minutes later (some of the chainmail fastenings could be damn fiddly at times) he emerged clanking back into the kitchen, where Trilby, fully dressed in hardened leather and a quartered red-and-white surcoat, gave him a rueful look.

"Nothing at all in the pantries, sir," he said. "I suppose we're meant to attend the Great Hall for breakfast."

"Presumably," said Sir Cadogan.

"By the way, sir, have you noticed anything unusual?"

"Beyond the entire magical society and people and items hitherto lurking under our noses?" Trilby shot him a frustrated look. Snarky comments to daft questions were his area of expertise. His master was showing dangerous signs of learning.

"No, not that – which we'll be discussing later, sir. I mean in a more local sense."

"Such as?"

"Well … your armour, for one." When Cadogan opened his mouth, Trilby hurriedly pressed on. "It wasn't as spic and span as that when you went to sleep, was it, sir? And my clothes were washed and pressed as well. And the hearth was cleaned out when I looked at it just now. All of that must have been done when we were sleeping, and pretty stealthily as well."

"True enough. I'll admit to being a light sleeper at times."

"Light sleeper nothing, sir. Remember when that bandit tried to sneak into our campsite when we were in Nottingham? I was still trying to wake up when you were chasing him around the forest with your poleaxe. Stark naked, no less."

Cadogan remembered it, then brushed it aside.

"It must have been magic, lad. Maybe they've got some way of ensorceling a building so it cleans itself up."

"Perhaps, sir," said Trilby dubiously.

Cadogan stared around the room, then ventured, cautiously, "Is there a wizarding menial in the vicinity?"

With a crack and a flash, something appeared in the middle of the room, making Cadogan grab for his weapon and making Trilby fly backwards out of his chair with a startled curse. The thing which appeared couldn't have been taller than two feet, with spindly, wrinkled limbs, pointed ears bristling with snowy white hair, big luminous eyes, and drooping white moustaches hanging from its upper lip.

"Indeed there is a menial in the vicinity," the creature squeaked in a high, croaky voice, while Trilby discretely got back to his feet and Cadogan's hand moved away from the shaft of his poleaxe. "Locke is this menial's name, and Locke has been ordered by Headmistress Canmore to attend to your household. Can Locke be of service?"

Cadogan stood, silent and uncertain, while Trilby managed "_What are you?_"

"Why, Locke is a house-elf," said Locke, staring with equanimity at Trilby. "Did the master not know that? Though Locke supposes that the master is a muggle, and couldn't be expected to know." The house-elf scratched the front of his toga, emblazoned with the Hogwarts coat of arms. "Locke will simply look after your house, along with others of Locke's kind. Have the masters eaten yet?"

"Er, no, but ..." began Trilby.

"Locke will get breakfast," said the house-elf, vanishing with another crack and a flash, making Trilby fall backwards again.

Cadogan blinked slowly. "We have a servant?" he said. "That's generous of the Headmistress."

"I'm not inclined to thank her," said Trilby. "That damn disappearing trick gives me a start every time it's done … gah!" as Locke abruptly reappeared, hidden under the weight of a huge tray of food.

"Here's breakfast, masters," he squeaked. "Headmistress Canmore also told Locke to tell the masters that '_You're both welcome to spend your morning and afternoon exploring the grounds and making yourself at home. I look forward to meeting you both at dinner tonight. If you should wish for anything in the meantime, merely inform the menial._'" Locke's voice had become an almost replica of Katelyn's when delivering the message. "Do the masters wish for anything else to be done?"

"Not right now."

Locke nodded, bobbed a brief bow, and set the tray on the table before vanishing. The breakfast tray made Cadogan and Trilby realise just how hungry they were. There was hot, freshly baked bread, fried rashers of cured bacon, pats of pork dripping, a small cooked chicken, and mugs of small beer.

They settled down to breakfast, and tore into the food with a passion.

"I propose we split up for today, sir" said Trilby partway into the meal, as he spread the dripping across a slice of bread. "We could explore the grounds, like Headmistress Canmore said, and tell each other about what we found."

"A fair idea," said Cadogan, who reflectively tore off a chicken breast. "I'm happy to take the grounds and surrounding countryside, if you'll take the castle."

They ate in silence for a few more minutes. Then,

"I'm surprised – pleased, make no mistake, but surprised – that you suggested it first, lad. I thought you would still have some reservations about getting involved in wizardry."

"It looks like I'm getting involved whether or not I want to," said Trilby. "So it makes sense that I at least try to learn as much about it as I can. You know, just so I can make a fair prediction about what's inevitably going to kill us."

"A practical attitude, though I can't attest as to its idealism. What's got you convinced of our eventual death?"

"Apart from our entry into a society permeated with and powered by a blind, chaotic, church-condemned form of power, which manifests itself in reality warping powers on the part of individuals and ravening wild beasts which defy established biological laws? Nothing, really. Although now I think about it, there's also the prospect of shadow factions and power-brokers among the wizards desiring our death based upon our birth." Trilby laughed a grim laugh. "And that would be where the reality warping powers in the hands of individuals come into play, and not for our benefit."

"Magic itself could be a bit tricky to come to terms with, I'll concede that. But we can handle the creatures. And as for the wizards, why, I bet they're really just the same as us underneath."

"Vicious, territorial, and blood-thirsty shaved gibbons, sir?"

"You and I are going to have a talk about that cynicism of yours one day, squire of mine. Just finish your breakfast. We'll have to find out as much as we can today about wizards."

They nodded in agreement, then devoted their full energies to the food in front of them.

* * *

Once they had finished, they went their separate ways; Cadogan walking back down the same trail to the lake, with the intent of making a complete circuit and of making as complete an exploration as he could of the forest around Hogwarts; and Trilby moving back along the wooden walkway to Hogwarts castle.

Icy winds bit at him as he walked along the walkway, even through the fabric of his cloak, and the solid light grey sky above him promised even more snow atop the existing snow. The only colours in the world around him that weren't some variation on white were the dark green of the all-but-submerged pine trees, the black-and-brown-and grey of Hogwarts, and the distant twinkling silver of Sir Cadogan.

He shoved open the wooden door at the walkway's end, and emerged, chilly and stumbling, into the considerably cosier confines of Hogwarts. He shrugged off the cloak, hung it from nearby iron pegs set into the wall, and looked around him with a calculating expression.

Then he started exploring.

Up staircases he ascended, into dungeons he delved. He made frequent detours into the numberless nooks and crannies that drew him towards him with the compulsion of will-o-the-wisps. He stumbled across magical curiosity after sorceric contrivance. There were, in the classrooms and store cupboards and even out in the open, chests supported by hundreds of little legs, bells that constantly rung, messages scrawled on pieces of parchment that whipped and flew through the air like tiny folded birds. Statues and the odd painting would watch him, and offer the odd comment or observation as he passed ("Nice haircut, boy. Was your barber drunk?") and the hollow suits of armour he had seen yesterday stood at guard in the corridors with halberds at the ready, even barring his entry to certain rooms.

At one point, he was on one of the massive staircases in the central keep that facilitated movement from one floor to the next, and was shocked when it suddenly _turned_ with him on it, ponderously rotating to lock into place against another landing.

"You think your face was a picture, you should see the first-years each year," snickered a painting. "Never knows whether to scream or shout or gawp, they do."

He reached the top of one of the tallest towers, and onto the exposed top. The wide rim was surrounded with a carved parapet, and would have offered a breathtaking view of the sky and grounds if there had been anything other than snow to have one's breath taken away by.

"It gets bloody monotonous in winter, I'll tell you that," said a gargoyle. "Try again in summer. Of course, it's usually raining in summer, so you're out of luck either way."

Trilby descended back into the castle proper when a blizzard snuck up from behind, and spent more time exploring. People were fairly thin on the ground, he was beginning to notice. The castle was easily big enough to fit hundreds, even thousands, at a time, but the most he ever came across were a few small groups of pupils, who always kept their distance from the strange barbarian muggle. They must devote more of the Christmas period to holidays than we do, Trilby decided.

He began to examine the classrooms a bit more thoroughly. In the most northerly tower, he found, at the top of a winding staircase, a classroom bedecked in thick red velvet curtains and with crystal balls and tarot card decks at every table. He absently picked a few cards at random, and regarded the Fool, the Emperor, and Death with indifference. He had never put much stock in fortune-telling.

He came across another classroom on the seventh floor, which was bedecked with lecterns and containing terrifyingly arcane looking mathematical instruments and tools and parchments containing brain-eating equations. He fled quickly. By this point, as he passed a painting of a large lady in a pink dress (the only painting yet on this floor), he was getting more than a little frustrated with the lack of direction or rhyme or reason in the layout of Hogwarts. He wished fervently for some sort of map.

He passed by an unexceptional wooden door in an unexceptional stretch of wall, and decided to give it a try. He opened it. In the small room's centre, on a raised section of stone, there was a piece of unexceptional parchment. Unexceptional, that is, apart from the perfect inky map of Hogwarts which sprung into being across it when Trilby stepped nearer.

"Er," he said. This was a bit _too_ convenient. The map waited patiently.

"So," he said to the silent room. "Am … is that for me? Does it belong to someone? Or did you just make it for me on the spot or …?"

No reply was forthcoming. Trilby's fingers itched. He might die horribly if this was a trap, but a map would be useful...

"Oh, to hell with it," he decided, and reached out and took it without turning into a toad once. He scanned it over as he left the room, remembering to say "Thank you," as the door slammed shut behind him. It was an impressive map, showing all the rooms and corners of all the floors of Hogwarts in crisp black labelled detail, as well as tiny labelled figures rendered as dots, which moved even as Trilby watched them.

He saw "Classroom 3C (Practise Of and Defence Against the Dark Arts)" on the third floor, and was intrigued. He folded the map in his hand, and kept it in his grasp as he made his way downstairs, bumping into a trio of first years as he went. They all regarded him with undisguised nervousness, and flinched when he tried to make conversation. He gave up and moved on.

He arrived at the classroom, and discovered a wide and dingy space filled with desks. At the sides were cages, some of which had chains of silver or iron or holly wound around them, along with stacks of diagrams of dissected magical creatures and the odd incantation pronunciation guide. He moved up to the back, nearer to the large iron-sided desk, behind which were placed cabinets of preserved creatures in jars.

"There'd normally be a teacher in here," said a voice suddenly from behind him, "But he's gone for the holidays. At least, that's whit he claims. Personally, I wouldnae trust any creature of Gaunt with so much as a knut."

Trilby turned and saw the girl who had given himself and Sir Cadogan a piercing look yesterday standing in the doorway. She was of his age and height, with dark hair tied back in a ponytail and dark eyes set in the middle of a strongly-set face. Her robes were lined with blue, and a blue-and-bronze badge glimmered on her chest.

"And I'm nae sure whether I should trust_ ye_," she continued, sharply.

"Er, what?" said the discomfited Trilby.

"Ye and that pillock ye call a master have come here, at the maist inconvenient of times, at the bidding of a distant king, at a time when my mother needs tae focus," she said, advancing. "Whit's your game? Why are ye even here?"

"Look," said Trilby quickly, backing away slightly. "I don't even know who you are. Er, should we start with names? I'm Trilby, squire to Sir Cadogan. Who are …?"

"I am Katherine Canmore, daughter of Katelyn Canmore, the Heidmistress," she snapped. "Now, ye _will_ tell me the whole truth behind your purpose at Hogwarts, and the gods themselves willnae help ye if ye lie."

Trilby stopped when he bumped against the dge of the desk behind him. Now he had no avenue of escape. He breathed to steady himself, then faced Katherine as best he could.

"Look," he began as calmly as he could, "I don't know what you're accusing me of. I don't know why you're accusing me, though I know a little of the situation you're in. But I swear that this is the truth. I and my master had never encountered or heard of wizardry before yesterday. We were only sent here because of a command from a king, we had no idea of what we were getting into, and we didn't have any plans for this. I'm not here with a purpose." He smiled, desperately, in an attempt to sway the glower with which she fixed him. "That's the truth."

She maintained the glower for a few seconds more, then let it relax, and then dispelled it altogether.

"I ... believe ye," she said at last, with genuine regret replacing a part of the fire in her voice. "I'm sorry if I seemed abrupt. I'm sure now that you're here with no malicious purpose. We're all of us here just a wee bit on edge. I didnae ken whit to make of ye."

"I accept your apology. If it helps, I'm not especially up to speed either," said Trilby quickly.

"Ye just happen to be an unknown," she said, pressing on with her explanation. "An unknown appearing at a difficult time. I knew why ye were coming, I just couldnae be sure your king wisnae being influenced."

Trilby weighed up the situation carefully. She seemed to be in the know on whatever the hell was going on here, she was the daughter of the headmistress, after all. He could talk to her, he thought as he looked her in the eyes. He might find out a thing or two to tell Sir Cadogan.

Well, that wasn't the only reason he wanted to talk to her, but best not to get ahead of himself.

"If you don't mind telling me, what is the situation here anyway?" he said, picking his words carefully. "Ever since we've arrived, we've seemed to have become embroiled in some sort of civil war between you wizards. What is it all about? Would you mind telling me?"

Her eyes assayed him critically, with a spark of interest behind them as well.

"Ye have a right to ken, I suppose," she said cautiously. "And if ye do ken, ye might even be of help to us."

"Does that mean..."

"It means we're about to take a wee walk thegether," said Katherine, extending a hand. "And a wee talk thegether as well."

Trilby took her cold, firm hand and let her lead him out, surprised and not altogether displeased by this turn of events. As he walked out the classroom, he suddenly remembered that he had laid that strange map down somewhere in the room. For half a moment, he was tempted to go back and get it.

He dismissed it from mind. He could get it some other time.

It would turn up later, he was sure.

* * *

Sir Cadogan rounded a bend in the trail surrounding the lake, past a copse of trees, and came face to face with the Headmistress. He was still only halfway around the great lake.

"Headmistress," he said respectfully, dipping his head. "I didn't know you were out walking."

"I'm not," she said simply. "I was waiting for ye here."

"I'm sorry?"

"I guessed ye were the type to leap at the chance to explore the great outdoors. I didnae guess wrong," Her mouth bent in a wry smile, then she sighed. "Sir knight, I'll be honest with ye. It was wrong to involve ye in this, I should have refused the muggle queen. But undoing this would present difficulties. And ye hae a right to ken the truth of what exactly ye've become involved in, now that ye are set upon it."

"I'd gathered not everything's been sunshine and roses in the wizarding world lately." Cadogan was instantly intrigued. "The Malfoy twins tried to keep me out of it. What I suspect you're about to tell me about, that is."

"That was wrong of them. Good-intentioned, but wrong. Ye would've become involved sooner rather than later, whether ye wanted to or no." She fixed him with a piercing look (the ability to do so ran in the family). "Come with me for a while, sir knight. We're going to have a wee palaver about certain relevant things."

"What about?"

"About magic. About history. About monsters. And about the Masquerade."


	9. Acclimatization, Pt 2

It all began with Merlin.

Well, that's not entirely true. Merlin's actions were only one part of a long and bloody story that had been going on for the entire length of human history. But it would be accurate to say that Merlin set the story on a new path, one with hopefully less blood in it than before.

All you need to know about the earlier bits is that they rarely ended well for anyone. Ever since the first ape-descendant looked into a pool of water at its reflection and thought "I am that," (and also ever since a related ape-descendant had made glowing butterflies appear with a snap of its fingers) muggles and wizards had shared the world grudgingly. Those without magic envied and hated those with it, those with it scorned and despised those without, and conflict had inevitably arisen.

At first, the wizards, or shamans, or mancers, or however they named themselves, _ruled_. Magic had been their weapon, their whip, their way of keeping the bulk of humanity in line. Point to any ancient nation, and chances were that you would have found a wizard or witch at the top. And the muggles slaved, and sweated, and resented their overlords. And they discovered the secrets of iron and armies while the wizards fixed themselves solely upon magic. And battle was waged, and battle bred battle, and no peace was found between the two seams of humanity from palaeolithic times until the fall of the Roman Empire (and the death of the last Sorceror-Imperator).

It was during this time, while Europe ate itself in the fires of war and anarchy, that Merlin arose from the scattered wizard clans of Britannia. He was gifted in spellcraft and diplomacy, and he had devised a new means of ending the endless war. He made secret contact with Arthur, the newly arisen warlord of the Romano-Celts, and Gartnait, King of the Picts, and proposed the beginnings of the Masquerade.

The Masquerade was simple. The wizards and muggles of Britain would separate themselves into two walled communities, with communication between the two limited to between the heads of state. No muggle with knowledge of the Masquerade would wage war on wizards, no wizard would interfere with a muggle. No undue questions would be asked of either partner, and information would be volunteered only when it might have an impact on the other world. The Masquerade would be adhered to out of trust between the two leaders, reinforced by the threat of mutually-assured destruction. In a war, the sparse population of wizards would guarantee their eventual destruction, but they could wreak untold havoc before the end. As such, ignorance would be maintained, and wizards would recede to mere folk-memories in the minds of muggles.

Arthur and Gaitnart accepted. The Masquerade had begun, and Merlin was quick to spread the concept to the heads of the other magical nations across the world. Through diplomacy, negotiation, intimidation (and not a little _Imperius_-ing), the other wizarding lords followed suit.

And peace of a sort began. Muggles would continue to fight bloody wars, of course, but they were wars which rarely spilled over onto the wizards, who gradually grew apart from muggles and developed their own culture and systems of conduct. The worlds split apart in their opposite directions, and wizards became little more than legends.

Merlin himself died a century later, and left the world considerably different in his wake. Even the disparate wizarding clans of old Britannia, having lost their traditional pastime of warring on muggles, settled into the modern wizarding families and grew comfortable with low-key politics and bloodless feuds against the others. Each wizard policed the Masquerade, and took measures against transgressors.

At the dawn of the millennium, magical Britain underwent another upheaval. Four wizards, the greatest of their generation, united to create a seat of power in Britain. Rowena Ravenclaw, from Scotland, Helga Hufflepuff, from Wales, Salazar Slytherin, from the north of England, and Godric Gryffindor, from Cornwall, founded Hogwarts as a seat of learning and government. They stood united, until arguments over admissions erupted.

A few muggles had always displayed signs of magical talent down the years; the result of married-out squibs asserting the magical trait in the family. Godric championed taking in these muggles as students to boost the flagging population of wizards. In this, he was supported by Helga and Rowena. Salazar vehemently disagreed. His own family had been the victims of an unintentional breach of the Masquerade by a muggle mob, and he refused to countenance the possibility of leaked knowledge of wizards to the muggle population at large.

The argument escalated. Heated words were exchanged. Curses were spat in anger. Wands were drawn. And Salazar and Godric, who had been as close as brothers, finished as enemies. Unwilling to fight all three of his oldest friends, Salazar left Hogwarts forever, but not before secretly creating a hidden chamber in the castle containing his guardian, to be unleashed by his heir if Hogwarts was ever threatened by muggles.

The river of history flowed on. Hogwarts and the wizarding world alike flourished at the influx of muggle-borns, who not only boosted the wizarding population but also added some badly needed diversity to the gene pool. New noble houses were founded. The reverence for blood purity diminished below its pre-Masquerade levels, though it never entirely vanished. Headmasters and Headmistresses rose and fell at Hogwarts, summer followed winter, and the noble houses set into their traditions of squabbling, intermarrying, and from time to time ruling. Wizard society became stable and almost peaceful. The noble families exerted a mild authority over the smaller houses, the muggle-borns and half-bloods worked and strived and integrated themselves, the students worked their brains out, regardless of heritage, and the headteacher of Hogwarts gently kept them all in line.

* * *

The gist of all this was imparted to Cadogan and Trilby both, as they either walked along a wooden walkway or by a still lakeside.

They listened in rapt silence. Every statement by the Canmores threw up a thousand questions and possibilities, each revelation into a magical world was absorbed and mulled over. One principle thing, however, remained unexplained.

"So what's being going on lately?" asked Sir Cadogan of Katelyn, as they began a second circuit of the lake. Far away, Trilby asked the same of Katherine. "I infer that something's threatening to disrupt this peace."

Katelyn said, grimly and frigidly, "Aye. And it threatens not only to disrupt it, but smash and skail the two worlds forevermore."

"What does?"

Katelen explained, in the same grim, cold tone, exactly what.

* * *

Salazar had had just one daughter before he died, and she had married and brought the wealth of her family into the relatively impoverished house of her husband. A young wizard, by the name of Cormoran Gaunt.

The Gaunts venerated their connection to Salazar Slytherin himself, and retained many of his views out of a sense of loyalty. They strictly adhered to the Masquerade, avoiding all contact with muggles as much as was humanly possible. They harboured suspicions towards muggle-borns and half-bloods, believing them to be potential informants for the muggle nations and perils to wizarding Britain, though a old and well-respected half-blood may win some measure of trust. They valued blood-purity, they followed Sytherin's teachings and instilled resourcefulness and leadership into their children. They were the model of a noble house; conservative, mindful of wizarding traditions, and, if not exactly liked by most other houses, at least treated with respect.

Then, six years ago, old Maverin Gaunt had died in mysterious circumstances along with his oldest son, leaving his remaining child, Nachlan Gaunt, to become the Lord of House Gaunt.

Drawing upon the web of banner houses and old allies of the Gaunts, he had quickly established himself as a powerful figure in wizarding politics. He attended all the important events in high society, and exercised his natural charm and good looks to win the friendship of many of the great houses. He reached down to the smaller houses, especially to those of distinguished bloodlines, and promised power and protection in exchange for their support. House Gaunt's support grew rapidly in the space of two years, until Nachlan could claim to have a hold on more than half the noble houses of Britain.

Then he revealed his true colours.

Nachlan Gaunt had begun to speak of wizarding history, and of the circumstances that led to the Masquerade. He mentioned, in his frequent and always-polite conversations with other nobles, how the natural place of wizards as the rulers of the world had been usurped by muggles. He suggested that the supremacy of wizards had been in the decline ever since they had bred with muggles to increase their numbers and permitted the education of mudbloods, playing on the old prejudices. He suggested that continued out-breeding and the Masquerade prevented wizards from reclaiming that old supremacy.

And he hinted, always merely hinted in the open, that it was past time the world was reclaimed by its rightful, _pure_ rulers. With fire and bloodshed, if necessary.

The proud, the dispossessed, and those in need of a scapegoat to blame for their troubles accepted his words eagerly. They parroted his words to others, they began to organise themselves around Gaunt's banner, they came to regard the handsome young lord as a prophet and potential saviour of wizardry.

There was, needless to say, opposition. Half-bloods and muggle-borns were alarmed by the hatred directed against them from a powerful and growing fraction of the wizard population, and noble houses who had muggle sympathies and supported the Masquerade likewise grew wary of what might come of Gaunt's attempt to break the Masquerade. Katelyn Canmore had opposed Gaunt's plans as well, and had, by the status of her position as Headmistress, become the unofficial leader of those determined to uphold the Masquerade.

Magical Britain had divided into two armed camps. Old alliances were broken and new, rash ones were made. Fear and uncertainty for the future arose. Friction increased. And throughout it all, Gaunt always acted within the rules of etiquette that governed wizards, and committed no act that would be a cause for open conflict. He always smiled, always smoothed his way through any disputes, and always came out smelling like roses even as he preached atrocity after atrocity.

Matters came to a head, in a horrific manner, when old Orion Malfoy, a previous ally of House Gaunt and now a staunch defender of the Masquerade, made his views on the matter clear to all wizardom.

"We mus not let ourselves be governed by the fanatics amongst us!" he had thundered at an assembly. "This faction amongst us that seeks to destroy Merlin's Masquerade, that seeks to undo the protection that has kept us safe from the meddling of muggles for near a thousand years, _must_ be opposed! They must _not_ be heeded!"

His words had been powerful and fiery. Gaunt had remained silent in the face of the outburst. A few days later, the old man had been found mindless and still at the edge of his own estate. He had suffered the Dementor's Kiss, and all that he was had been reduced to a mindless husk.

Of course, accidents with wild Dementors _did_ happen, and though it was widely rumoured Lord Gaunt had made … arrangements … with packs of the monsters, those could be easily dismissed as malicious slander. It could only be a tragic accident, polite society agreed, nothing more.

But he wasn't the last to run afoul of a tragic accident. A prominent half-blood witch was found flayed and dead off the coast of Bristol. Muggle-born families vanished. Unsubstantiated reports of mass muggle-killings filtered back from some of the most far-flung communities. Each and every story was dismissed by Gaunt with a smile and a much-repeated explanation that though he wished to change the state of affairs in magical Britain, he wished only to do so in the most peaceful of manners, and that he would personally bring to justice whoever could be responsible for such acts, _if_ they were true.

But his smile now had a bloody, sinister edge to it, and tensions and violence between the two factions escalated. And now Britain was on the edge of an all-out Wizarding War, and the rivers would run red with magical and muggle blood alike if it came to pass.

* * *

Cadogan held his silence. He and Katelyn walked silently onwards over the frozen grass. In the distance, in the middle of the lake, a great tentacle lazily broke the surface, waved once, then submerged.

"How do you know it's him?" said Cadogan suddenly. Katelyn turned and regarded him, puzzled.

"I mean, you seem convinced that there is an organised campaign being waged by Gaunt against … muggle-borns and halfbloods." Cadogan strained to remember the right terms. "You seem very definite that the attacks aren't random, that they're all ordered by Gaunt. Why are you convinced? Do you have spies or double agents, or …?"

"Spies," replied Katelyn. "One of the noble families, apart from the Malfoys, has two members that have been especially helpful to us. I willnae tell you whom, I dinnae want to risk ye revealing it in error, but they've been an invaluable aid to the supporters of the Masquerade."

"What sort of things have they found out?"

"Apart from all the things I mentioned?" Katelyn considered the question, then her face set. "Aye, here's a wee story for ye. Pay attention."

"Our Practise Of and Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher is new. And I'm certain he's a creature of Gaunt's, but he was the only candidate. I had nae choice but to take him."

"The previous teacher held the post until the summer this year. Down in London, ye see, we had discovered nae less than a dozen muggle children with magical talent, and of age to come to Hogwarts. They were all street-urchins as well, and we reckoned they would accept the chance of a better life aff the streets with open airms. I sent the Dark Arts teacher, Professor Deverill, to find them and offer them the chance. We couldnae send them owls, for we knew maist of them probably couldnae read. It was a windfall, the largest crop of potential students we'd sighted for years from one city."

"A couple of days after he left, Deverill contacted me via Floo Powder, to tell me that all the muggle-borns had accepted the offer, and that he'd bring them up that very night by Side-Along Apparition, to outside of Hogsmeade."

"I waited for him. And waited. And by the time he'd not arrived the following morning, I sent out parties searching for him."

Her voice trembled with grief and fury.

"We found him – him and the children baith – in pieces a dozen miles south of Hogsmeade. It was … was _carnage_, wanton damn carnage. Naithing bigger than a hand could be picked out. People said that it must have been Splinching – that's when bits of your body split off when Apparating gangs agley – on a horrific scale. It had all the hallmarks of it. And why assume malicious intervention when it could have been tragic error?" A bitter chuckle escaped her. "Splinching can happen to even the best wizards when they lose concentration, and taking along a dozen people with ye requires a _lot_ of concentration. Much likelier to befall someone than, say, one highly powerful wizard lying in wait and unleashing a barrage of Cutting Charms and Blasting Curses."

"But, as it happens, one of oor agents reported to me that he'd sighted Gaunt later that night, his robes red with blood and his smile as wide and bright as anything. So ye'll understand why I'm putting my money on the one wizard rather than Splinching."

Cadogan started to speak, but Katelyn interrupted.

"Do ye understand now, sir knight? Do ye understand what ye've gotten involved in? You're in the middle of an undeclared war with a mass murdering madman, whom no one can accuse and who no one dares to challenge for fear of inviting his wrath. I'd sooner ye'd not become involved, but it was this or risk interference from all of muggle Britain, and that could make this even more of a disaster."

"But now that I am involved, you've got no choice but to make use of me."

"Correct." She sighed. "I may, from time to time, require the assistance of a skilful muggle. One who has at least a few decades of experience in fighting and travelling under their belt, who can improvise, who can act outwith the boundaries of polite wizarding society, who is trustworthy, and who can remain underestimated by their enemies until it's too late. Are ye sic a muggle?"

"You forgot my experience in slaying monsters."

"Aye? The real sort, or the metaphorical sort?"

* * *

"...Anyway, the upshot of it all is that Gaunt's a mad bastard who'll kill us all if we arnae careful," said Katherine firmly. She and Trilby had wandered down to the school gates, and were standing by one of the walls and looking down at Hogsmeade.

"It's near the afternoon," said Trilby suddenly, looking up at the sky. The position of the sun was just about discernable through a thick layer of cloud. "I have to get back to Sir Cadogan. I ..."

"Hmm? Okay," said Katherine. "If you're going now, then I suppose I may as well walk ye back up. I've got work in the school to be getting on with anyway."

They turned back and trudged up the snow-sodden trail, along the same they had taken down until they finally reached the great door leading into the castle. They parted ways there, Katherine announcing herself to the doors, which swung open ponderously, while Trilby turned off towards the path that led back to the cottage.

"Er," said Trilby, making Katherine turn.

"Er, that is, I was just wondering … are you doing anything later? I mean, if you're not busy..."

She paused, taken aback, and something that could have been interest flickered across her face as she regarded Trilby. Her face then decided on a faint smile as she said "I'll see ye at dinner tonight, won't I?", then vanished through the doors.

Trilby walked on, in a thoughtful (and slightly panicked) mood. He reached the cottage at the same time that Sir Cadogan returned from his own walk.

"_There_ you are," they both announced upon sighting the other. "Wait until you hear what I've found out..."

There was a pause, and then both of them said "Okay, after you..."


	10. Solstice Palaver

In the weeks up to Christmas, the days followed each other with an unyielding rhythm. Each began bedecked with snow and frost, the sun would make a feeble foray in the afternoon, and then be ruthlessly shoved aside by deep rolling clouds that filled the sky. It was a harsh winter, at least for those without magical sources of heat.

Trilby and Cadogan spent a lot of it exploring this strange new world further.

It wasn't just physical exploration of the grounds, although plenty of that was done (_'For future reference, approach all willows at Hogwarts with trepidation'_ recorded Trilby) inasmuch as anything could be made out beneath the snowdrifts. The area had all the hallmarks of the Highlands, Cadogan saw, with expanses of pine forest covering winding chains of mountains for miles around. But he had had past occasion to visit the Scottish Highlands, and he could not for the life of him determine where Hogwarts exactly _was_. He recognised no features he had seen previously, found no towns or villages around apart from Hogsmeade, saw nothing that indicated that Hogwarts didn't exist in its own little separate pocket of reality. It had to be the ancient spells mentioned by Hydra that kept it apart and unlocatable, he decided.

Cadogan also spoke with the professors at the school whenever they could, having failed to get much out of the student body beyond looks of alarm, curiosity, and/or terror. Professors Diggory and Dresden were both polite but slightly distant, seemingly more than a little wary of the muggle in their midst. Professor Cuthbert Binns was more forthcoming, but the young man's conversation was sadly lacking.

"You wizards must have a very interesting history," said Sir Cadogan one morning to Cuthbert in his classroom.

"Oh, of course, as I frequently expound upon to my students," said Cuthbert, whose manner of speech had the remarkable talent to shift from initial enthusiasm to monotonous drone in the space of a single sentence. "Why, to take but one example, the turmoil that resulted from the Great Goblin Rebellion of 1168 when Chieftain Battershank declared war upon..." and so on until Sir Cadogan was horizontal and snoring, a state of affairs to which Cuthbert was oblivious.

It always seemed to come down to goblin rebellions. Cadogan had never met such a creature, but he hated them already for spurring Cuthbert's lectures.

Professor Markus Oshiro was more enjoyable company, and had the virtue of teaching an intriguing subject, which he was happy to demonstrate to Cadogan.

"Are you ready for this?" he enquired of Cadogan one brisk afternoon, as they waded through snow in the forest, on their way to some project of Markus's. "Trust me, _you are not prepared_."

"Come now, it can't be that surprising..." began Cadogan, then his jaw dropped as they rounded one last bend in the forest frail and came upon a secluded clearing. In the clearing, a family of creatures with the front legs, wings, and heads of eagles and the body, hind legs and tail of horses were gathered, grooming each other or slumbering on the ground.

"Are they … griffins?" said Cadogan uncertainly, staring at creatures he had never seen outside tapestries or heraldry.

"Close. Hippogriffs." Markus's face split in a wide grin. "I think I'll try breeding a herd of them. They'll be good material for some future teacher if I put in the effort now, don't you think? Er, you might want to bow to them..." as the biggest hippogriff suddenly fixed Cadogan with a piercing amber gaze.

"What?" said Cadogan, too slowly.

Luckily, Hippogriff slashes took hardly any time at all to heal.

Headmistress Canmore was rarely-glimpsed and seldom spoken to after their long meeting by the lakeside. Most of her business, now that the holidays relieved her of the burden of running the school, was either conducted in her office or outside the school. Nobody ever commented on her absences, but an undercurrent of tension rose every time she left regardless.

Katherine Canmore, on the other hand, was far more frequently seen, and by Trilby for the most part. It was peculiar, reflected Trilby afterwards, how he didn't seem to notice the cold on their long walks. Not that he was complaining.

"So, ah, um, tell me," he ventured once on one of their walks around the lake, with a romantic turn of phrase that would have undoubtedly rendered your typical playwright apoplectic with envy, "Have you … stayed your entire life in Hogwarts? Has your mum always been the Headmistress or …?"

"Not always, no," she said with a chuckle that made Trilby blush inwardly. "Probably not ever since she was a wean. Ye need to have life experience before being considered for the post, I think."

"I meant..."

"Ach, I'm only teasing. And I've not always lived here, no. Mum was made Headmistress when I was about six, well before I could attend the school properly. Not that that stopped me learning. By the time my first year came around, I was well-prepared for all the classes." Her face clouded over slightly. "I'll admit, it wasn't always that sociable. Most others in my year werenae sure what to make of the Headmistress's daughter. It could get a bit lonely at times."

"It must have been difficult at times," offered up Trilby.

"Aye, at times. But when ye've got a good book at hand, ye've got a hundred friends," she said, with a slightly strained smile. "Being in Ravenclaw does have its perks. The dormitory's got its ain library. And being a prefect means ye get access to mair areas of the school library."

"Well, that's always a good perk of any position."

"You're telling me. And Mum made sure I knew how to use magic from a young age as well, well before I could properly attend the school. Though I did sometimes read ahead, as it were."

"What do you mean?"

"Ye ken how I mentioned not knowing many other children when I was growing up? I got around that. I wonder how many other children enchanted the suits of armour to play hopscotch with them?"

Trilby imagined one of the solemn suits of full plate he had seen in the corridors hopping along a hopscotch course, and laughed. Katherine joined in.

They walked on in silence for a few minutes. Far away, in the middle of the lake, a great tentacle lazily broke the nearly-frozen surface with the sound of distant splashing and splintering.

"Would ye mind telling me about yourself?" said Katherine suddenly, looking at Trilby with a measure of curiosity. "I'm sorry if I sound over-eager, but you're the first muggle I've ever really spoken to. And we hardly know anything about ye either, behind the Masquerade. I'd like to ken a few mair things."

"Oh, me? That's, ah, a pretty boring subject. I'm afraid there's not much of me to tell."

"Well, tell me what there is. If ye dinnae mind."

"Very well." Trilby cleared his throat, then began. "I was born into … well, the equivalent of one of your noble houses, actually. The son of a lord and lady. Brought in the lap of luxury. Well, maybe not luxury, but we certainly didn't want for anything while I was growing up."

"Aye?" she said, her eyes alight with curiousity. "Which family?"

"Anyway," he said, moving on quickly, "It, ah, didn't last. My father went off to go and fight in the Ninth Crusade, leaving me and my mother at home when I was five. We got word back that he had died as soon as he had landed, of an infected mosquito bite on his lip. Not a glorious end for a crusading noble."

Katherine's hand slipped gently around his. "I'm sorry," she said.

"It's okay, really. I can hardly remember the man, and it wasn't his death that affected me, so much as what it caused. My mother remarried, to another lord who had always had ambitions on our holdings. He loved my mother and his own children. Alas, he had no love left over for me, especially since I was older than his own children and stood to inherit all the family lands over his own blood. He tried to have me killed, and I escaped, don't ask how, and fled far away. I heard he later told my mother that I'd died in the forest."

"I ended up in London, and that's where I lived for three years. I was just another bedraggled child amongst flocks of other bedraggled children, and I really had to fight to survive. Thievery, lock-breaking, furtiveness, a certain cavalier regard for fair play and conduct, I had all these drummed into me if I wanted to live. And though I don't mean to boast, I learned to catch rats like a champion. They're especially tasty if you char them slightly, just so you know."

"Careful now, my breakfast's sitting uneasy. I take it ye escaped from that sooner rather than later?"

"Well, one day when I was eight, I saw a good horse in a stable, and I thought it would make a fine catch for a disreputable horse-broker I knew in the city. There were a few men around, but I slipped past them unnoticed on my way to the horse. I got the animal, unhitched it, and nearly made off with it into the streets before the owner noticed me. Guess who that owner was?"

"Sir Cadogan?" said Katherine.

"Yes. Our first ever meeting, I tried to steal his horse, and he gave me an almighty clip around the ear and such a yelling-at as you can't imagine. Then, after I'd stopped seeing stars, he asked why I'd done it, and when I told him that I needed the money from the horse to buy food, he got me food there and then." Trilby shook his head in wonderment. "He asked me a few more questions, pretty kindly as well, and confessed himself impressed at the skills of a boy who managed to get under his gaze and nearly make off with his horse. He then asked me to become his squire."

"That must have come as a shock. What did ye think made him do that?"

Trilby was silent for a moment. Then, "I could remember then what I'd learned about knights while I was still the son of a noble. I'd heard all the stories of bold knights who went forth to battle evil, who slew dragons, who rescued fair damsels and behaved chivalrously and … well, who were just stories. A knight's just a man with a sword, a horse, and a parcel of land. The code of chivalry's just meant to keep them in check, it could never have been meant to guide their every action. But Sir Cadogan …" Trilby floundered again. "He rescued a starving child from the streets, a child that had just tried to steal from him. He fed me, and made me his apprentice, and admittedly, insisted on taking me into mortal peril alongside him for all the years afterwards, but that's beside the point. He acted like how a knight should. And he acts like that all the time. He jumps at every opportunity to do good, no matter how improbable or impossible or impersonal it may be. And I don't know _why_."

"Ye're surprised that a man would do good over evil?"

"I … no. But I've never seen anyone else do it with the same intensity he does, like he was something out of a story. I've wondered whether there's something spurring him on, something in his past making him behave that way, or whether he's got a different take on things, or whatever." Trilby wondered whether he should sharing this much about his master with someone he'd only met relatively recently, but what could he tell her that was certain? "I've asked him a few times, usually when I was pretty damn drunk, and he never answers. He just sort of freezes up, and then tells me to never bother with the past. He doesn't like the past. It's probably best not to ask too much."

The only sound then was the sound of rushing wind, and the distant _twoo-hoo_ing of messenger owls flying overhead. The giant squid had submerged once more.

"But enough about me and Sir Cadogan," said Trilby quickly. "What else do you do here? I'm dying to know..."

These conversations and mutual revelations made up the most serious events at Hogwarts in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Nothing was rushed, and Trilby and Cadogan had plenty of time on their hands and few disturbances to get in the way of their education.

Christmas morning dawned in a similarly serene fashion. Trilby and Cadogan made it up to the castle by late morning, to find a platoon of house-elfs rearranging the tables in the Great Hall, under the direction of Katherine.

"What's going on? Is there going to be a special feast or something?" enquired Trilby. Behind him, a house-elf who had been given the job of placing wreathes around the suits of armour tossed one on over Cadogan's head and vanished before the knight could react.

"Aye," said Katherine, dressed in her finest blue robes. "It's the same format, really. Sit down, eat till your belt explodes, waddle to bed, the usual fashion for a feast. But the custom's to seat all the pupils and teachers that are left at the same table. As well as any dignitaries attending the school," she said, throwing a look at Trilby and Cadogan, whom was busy tugging off the wreath and cursing it under his breath.

"Sounds good," said Trilby. Above him, the enchanted ceiling showed a gentle shower of snow, from a clear white sky.

"Teachers, pupils, dignitaries. And any nobles who invite themselves are welcome as well by custom."


	11. Cloak and Dagger

Four smaller tables had been summoned from some dusty storeroom in the back of Hogwarts, and had been arranged into a square and covered with white table clothes, which had in turn been topped with dish after steaming dish of food.

"Sir knight? Please, take my left," said Katelyn, motioning at the seat to her left, as she sat at the centre of the side looking towards the door to the entrance hall. Cadogan took the seat, his armour gleaming, and Trilby seated himself to his left in turn, and Katherine sat to her mother's right.

Cadogan's eyes ran over the feast with more than a little awe. Platters of boiled and roasted and stewed vegetables flanked loaves of bread made from a dozen different cereals, acting as mere side-dishes to the more impressive dishes. At least eight great geese lay roasted and crisp, two to a side, swimming in juice atop piles of brown onions and peas. Cuts of beef and pork also nestled between the geese, as did roasted pike, hot glazed pies, dishes of uncommonly fresh fruit, flagons of wine and beer and juice, cheeses, cellars of black and red and yellow spices, pastries...

Cadogan stopped to do a head count. There was himself, Trilby, the Katherine girl, and Katelyn present. There were the four professors, and maybe about a dozen students. There couldn't have been more than a score of people present at the table. A score. There was enough damn food here to feed _Rome_.

"Not to disparage the repast you've laid out for us, Headmistress," said Cadogan. "But this seems a bit … excessive. Won't most of this be wasted?"

"Undoubtedly. But less than ye think," said Katelyn, taking the linen napkin on the space in front of her and spreading it neatly across her lap. "We can expect to receive guests. A few nobles who dinnae celebrate in their homes often come here each year. The rest of my family should attend as well, as well as a few auld friends. As well as ony house that wants to curry favour with me." She snorted. "And I'm aften drunk enough at the end of the feast that I'm inclined to gie them that favour."

"Ah." The feast looked a lot less imposing now. Cadogan took a moment to admire the silverware, laid out in place of trenchers for the special occasion. His own plate and knife seemed to depict worked scenes of a huntsman pursuing a deer. Trilby's was decorated with ivy strands, Katelyn's had an image of the Greek pantheon. Presumably, every place setting in the hall had a unique set. No expense spared for wizards, it seemed. Even the feast's subtlety, a great model of Hogwarts castle wrought from marzipan and glazed fruit, with each turret raised out by a filled roll of pastry and each window made by a glaze of sugar and countless tiny edible details making up the edifice as a whole, would have a challenge for even the greatest of French court confectioniers to make. Beside the platform on which the subtlety was raised in the centre of the square of tables, a strange beast with a glimmering multicoloured tortoise shell and a crab's head and legs lay crouched, from time to time emitting noises that could have come from a blocked furnace.

Katelyn tapped her knife against a elegant frosted glass, quieting a few chattering students, and cleared her throat.

"It is a Headmistress's duty to say a few words before the Christmas feast," she said to the expectant hush, "It is also a Headmistress's duty, out of thankfulness for the food, to keep these words concise. Dig in, ye lot." She sat to cheers, and the feast began. As if on a pre-arranged signal, the tortoise-beast (had Professor Oshiro called it a Fire Crab?) picked itself up, turned away from the subtlety, bent over slightly, and loosed a jet of flame from its fundament that billowed into the open main door of the marzipan castle and lit the entire thing up from within. Fire danced behind each tiny window and flared above the little turrets to appreciative gasps and whoops.

Cadogan spooned generous quantities of food onto his plate, and dished out portions to Trilby's as well wherever they were nearer to him than the lad. Goose and peas and bread chunks and slivers of pike soon jostled for space on his plate, and Cadogan attacked them with knife and fingers and more than a little relish, as everyone else around the table did. He couldn't remember the last time he had eaten this well.

"The next time I see a house-elf, I'm going to congratulate the little bugger profusely," he said to Trilby after swallowing a mouthful of mashed green beans and pork. "As long as I'm not distracting it from cooking at the time, that is."

"Glophh mmmph fthg?" said Trilby through a goose leg.

"Well put, lad," said Cadogan gravely, turning his attention back to the food.

The feast continued. Wine and water flowed freely. Mouths loosened and the air sparkled with laughter and snatched conversation. Cadogan poured himself a sparkling purple stream of damson wine and an equal measure for Trilby. The warmth of the fires was almost making him drowsy, and his gradually filling stomach didn't aid matters.

He was broken out of drowsiness by a sudden loud rapping at the door of the hall, and a great booming voice announcing "Hughnon Weasley and two guests request to join the Hogwarts feast, to do honour to Headmistress Canmore and her table."

Katelyn hastily swallowed her food and rose eagerly to announce "Headmistress Canmore is pleased to welcome Hughnon Weasley and his guests, and would be honoured to hae them at her table," by old, unassailable protocol.

The doors swung open, and Hughnon Weasley strode in. He was a giant of a man, huge in all three dimensions, and he wore his mane of red hair and beard and scarlet-and-gold quartered clothes with the confidence of born nobility. His brown eyes twinkled, set in a permanent smile, and his mouth was creased upwards at the sides.

He had every right to be proud. The Weasleys were an old and respected pure-blood house, able to trace their lineage to Godric Gryffindor himself. They were wealthy, gregarious, and firm supporters of the Masquerade. Hughnon was the latest in a series of house patriarchs, and had taken firm steps to continue the house's legacy. He had married once when he was still young, and his wife had died after the birth of her second child. In his grief, Hughnon had sworn to never marry again. He had kept that oath, being a sentimental man, but had still loved and sired children, being a, well, man. The two bastard children behind him attested to that, being just two of maybe two dozen FitzWeasleys scattered across Britain.

Katelyn was always pleased to see Hughnon, although she always gently rebuffed his interest. It was Gregor and Wallace FitzWeasley who were the focus of her attention.

"A pleasure to see you again, Katelyn," said Hughnon from across the hall as he approached. "I am always pleased to render service to House Canmore. And I am, as always, very much available to whatever needs you may have."

"A likewise pleasure to see ye, Hughnon," said Katelyn, walking to meet him. "I am, of course, honoured to accept whitever service House Weasley might offer. Although, alas, I remain very much disinclined."

"Ah, well. Let it not be said that I never tried," conceded Hughnon in (partially) mock-sorrowful tones as he gently bowed at the waist to kiss her hand. Then, in a surprisingly quiet and unnoticed manner, "And on the matter of service, the lads said they'd like a word with you."

"Aye? Then if ye would care to accompany me, lads? Please, take my place at table, Hughnon." With that, Ktelyn ushered Gregor and Wallace out of the hall quickly through a side-door. Hughnon planted himself in Katelyn's vacated seat, and helped himself to a carved side of goose, spearing it with his ruby-hilted knife.

"You've grown since last I saw you, lass," he remarked, smiling, to Katherine.

"As have you, Lord Weasley," said Katherine smoothly, with the air of old ritual.

Hughnon sighed melodramatically. "Heaven save me from the jibes and cruel words of Canmores. Such a malicious family, I've yet to find surpassed."

"We pride ourselves on cutting edges, Lord Weasley."

"Then it's pride well-deserved." He laughed, and turned to Sir Cadogan. He frowned quizzically for a moment, then his face lit up in realisation.

"Aye, there was a rumour going about that she'd brought a muggle knight to the school. I take it you're he?"

"Indeed I am. Sir Cadogan, by way of nowhere important." He stuck out a gauntleted hand for Hughnon to shake, and then regretted it.

"Hughnon Weasley, of House Weasley," boomed Hughnon, while Cadogan stifled a yell at his ground-together bones. "And any friend of House Canmore is a friend of House Weasley's, no matter their lineage."

"Oh merciful god, _my finger_s."

"And you must be the knight's knight-in-training!" boomed Hughnon over Cadogan's head at the startled Trilby. "A pleasure to meet you as well. I must say, I never expected to have unmagical muggles at Hogwarts. But what the hell. One in the eye for that bastard Gaunt, eh? You know about Gaunt?" he said suddenly, peering closely at Cadogan.

"Headmistress Canmore's already filled us in," said Cadogan, contorting his grimace of pain into a rakish grin. He didn't often have premonitions of the future, but he anticipated being challenged to a drinking contest by this man soon.

"Has she? Good! Then I'll speak plainly around you, and to hell with the etiquette. We're going to get along like champions, I can tell." He cast his gaze around the table.

"Where's the ale?" said Hughnon.

* * *

In the Headmistress's study, bound behind spells that stymied scrying and any magical or physical eavesdropping, Katelyn met with the Weasley bastards.

"And you're certain regarding your knowledge?" she said.

"Absolutely," said Gregor. He was half a head taller and two years older than his brother, Wallace. Both of them had inherited Hughnon's flame-red hair, and both of them had been sired by the same muggle woman. They were in their mid-twenties, and had the scrawny and alert looks of whippets.

"We checked it over, gathered proof, and sealed it away," said Wallace. "A ingredient shaving here, a spell recolection there, agreeing eyewitness accounts this way and that … we've got the dirt on Gaunt."

"Bring it up at the next Great Council, and you've got undeniable evidence that he's a traitor and Masquerade violator. He won't be able to deny it and hide behind pretty words. His allies and banner houses will forswear him so quickly his head'll spin," said Gregor.

"Give us until the 30th, and we'll have the last piece you need, and no way of escape for Gaunt," said Wallace.

Katelyn looked at the pair with gratitude. She had retained the Weasley bastards as informants and spies for close on two years now, keeping constant surveillance on Nachlan Gaunt and slowly but surely gathering evidence against him that could be used in a wizarding court. Gaunt had always claimed to act within the confines of wizarding law, never breaching the Masquerade inspite of his heartfelt opposition to it. He had been untouchable.

But a catalogue of his atrocities, a journal of his constant breaches of the Masquerade and of his countless other crimes against wizardom and muggles alike, backed up with collected evidence, would be all Katelyn needed to bring him and his faction crashing down.

True, he might strike out like a cornered serpent, but no other wizarding house could be seen to support a traitor. He would be isolated.

Katelyn could have jumped for joy.

"Ye get that evidence to me on the 30th, if not sooner, and we'll take Gaunt down," she swore. "I'll call for a Great Council. I'll bring up the evidence. And we can hae done with all this malarkey at lang last. And ye will be well rewarded."

"Just our duty, Headmistress," said Gregor.

"Though a reward would be most appreciated," said Wallace.

"Preferably one composed of women and wine and obscene amounts of money," said Gregor.

"I promise nothing about women. Now, would ye like to come back down to the feast?"

"Our pleasure, Headmistress," said Wallace, and with that, they left the study and began the winding journey back down to the great hall.

They got there just in time for the rest of House Canmore to show up and request entrance.

Cadogan watched as Katelyn embraced a short, balding, bearded man who looked like her younger brother, as Katherine got and mingled with the dozen or so people who entered, each of them with the dark hair and eyes of the Canmores. The family sat down at the table amidst gales of laughter and good-natured joshing, pouring themselves drinks and helping themselves to the still-vast quantities of food.

He turned away from it and poured himself more wine.

An hour passed at table, and a few of the students began to drift away with their laden stomachs back to their dormitories. Their places were soon filled, however, by other wizards who showed up. Several Prewetts turned up, already in an advanced state of inebriation. Lord and Lady Scamander appeared bearing dusty bottles of century-old Firewhisky, and were warmly greeted by all. The youngest son of Lord Torque showed up, bearing his father's greeting and an apology that he himself couldn't turn up due to a severe case of dragonpox.

Once more, things had settled down to an amiable buzz, with Cadogan's head growing thick with conversation and Hughnon's ribauld jokes and the growing sluggish presence of the alcohol inside him, by the time knocking came from the door once more.

A clear, loud voice announced, "Nachlan Gaunt and two guests request to join the Hogwarts feast, to do honour to Headmistress Canmore and her table."

A hush fell, just like that, across the hall.

Someone laughed, nervously. The air, to Cadogan's over-active, alcohol fuelled imagination, had seemed to become tense and cold.

Katelyn rose, steady and calm, and announced "Headmistress Canmore is pleased to welcome Nachlan Gaunt and his guests, and would be honoured to hae them at her table."

The door swung open, and Nachlan entered, two others trailing behind him.

He was a handsome animal, Cadogan gave him that. He was well-built and lean, his naturally unruly hair a deep shade of auburn and his eyes a bright, sparkling brown. He wore robes of deep black edged with silver, and wore a heavy gold locket set with an emerald _S_, and wore on one hand a gold ring set with a black stone.

His eyes twinkled with genuine delight even as he scanned the great hall like a predator. Cadogan noticed a faint line of scarring running up from the right side of Gaunt's mouth, both increasing and distorting the smile that came naturally to his face.

Too naturally, in Sir Cadogan's book. Even if he hadn't been forewarned, a man who smiled that much must be up to something.

The companions on either side of him walked a pace or so behind him. On his left was a tall woman with sharp features, matted waist-length hair, long yellowing nails and teeth, and a gown that looked as though it had been sown together from fur and hemp and twine. A man walked on Gaunt's right, round-bellied and grey bearded and clothed in sombre black robes.

Katelyn bowed slightly at the waist as they neared, a gesture which Gaunt and the man returned, and the woman as well after some hesitation.

"The Malfoy twins said you intended to pay me a visit, Lord Gaunt. I am honoured you could attend," said Katelyn, her voice neutral and polite. Full court courtesies were clearly in play here, and refusing to play along would be scandalous.

"The honour is all mine, Headmistress. Here, I brought a gift for your table," said Gaunt, reaching behind his back and drawing out a bottle of elf-made wine. The curving script on the faded label marked it out as a especially delectable blend.

"How generous, Lord Gaunt," replied Katelyn, accepting the bottle and turning it gently in her hands, looking ta it with interest. "Perhaps we should share a glass tonight." There would be no danger in the bottle, Katelyn knew. Poison was so easily detectable, and attempting to use it was considered rather bad form, to put it mildly. Trying to kill an opponent was one thing. Doing so in such a clumsy fashion compounded the insult.

Besides which, Katelyn knew, she was a pureblood witch. And Gaunt's skewed morals stopped him from killing a fellow pureblood. Harm, certainly, but never kill as such.

"May I introduce you to my guests?" said Gaunt. "The lady to my left is Skadi Ulfsdottor, a dignitary from Norway, here at my invitation." Skadi nodded, her canines gleaming and pointed. "And Lord Black to my right needs no introduction, I'm sure." Lord Horatio Black nodded uneasily, and shifted his weight from foot to foot and to the tip of the black cane he grasped.

Katelyn frowned at this initial assault in the great game of diplomatic niceties. Gaunt had come here for some purpose, but he had taken the effort to bring guests with him. Lord Black was an unwelcome sight at Gaunt's side. His family was among the more powerful and prestigious in wizarding society, and had been sitting on the fence throughout the whole of the recent conflict. His appearance here could only mean that Gaunt had seized him and his house at long last. The woman was more of a mystery, as she was an unknown factor. Perhaps that was the point, to show that Gaunt had allies which Katelyn had no conception of. Or maybe he was bluffing, and the woman was just for show.

Either way, the woman's piercing amber eyes made her uneasy. She passed her from mind, and turned back to Gaunt.

"Will you take a seat at my side, Lord Gaunt?"

"With pleasure, Headmistress." Gaunt took the seat at her right, as Katelyn resumed her usual place. Hughnon Weasley, who had moved to the other side of the table, looked at Gaunt with undisguised venom. The Canmore side had fallen silent and wary, looking to Katelyn. Tension was equally high amongst the other groups, and the students were quietly ushered away by the professors, who could tell when politics was in the air.

Cadogan stared levelly at Gaunt as the man sat down.

The wizard lord glanced around, and met Sir Cadogan's gaze.

What Cadogan saw almost hit him with a physical force. Puzzlement, then understanding flared in Gaunt's eyes, and were then both dispelled to make way for a wave of pure loathing that tore out from Gaunt's eyes and hammered into Cadogan.

The hatred in that gaze was like nothing human. Gaunt could clearly not tolerate Cadogan's presence in any way, shape, or form. The hatred was at once terrifyingly impersonal, and directed out at all mugglekind; and horrifically personal and focused on Cadogan alone. Gaunt's fingers gripped the table edge, clenching tight and digging into the knotted wood. One hand twitched, slightly, towards the wand at his side.

Then the moment passed, and Gaunt mastered himself once again and looked straight at Katelyn, pretending that Cadogan did not exist.

The experience left Cadogan profoundly unsettled.

"I fear that my presence here isn't entirely for pleasure, Headmistress," said Gaunt, after normal, if slightly strained and shrill, conversation had resumed and the hall was once more filled with the chink of glasses and the babble of chattering tongues. "I'm here in part to deliver a missive from several other lords."

"Aye? Let me see it." Katelyn washed her hands in a finger bowl in front of her and, wiping them dry on the front of her robes, reached for the parchment which had manifested in Gaunt's hand. She took it and looked it over, her expression imperturbable.

_We, the undersigned, do call for a Great Council of Wizardry to be held on the First of January of the new year 1293, to be attended by all noble families and banner house representatives in order that matters of great import be discussed for wizarding Britain._

Underneath were some two dozen signatures and seals supporting the call for a Great Council, all of them the heads of houses, and all of them in the service of Gaunt. Gaunt's own signature was at the top, in the same flowing script as the main text itself.

"The signatures of twenty heads of houses are what is normally required for an irregular Great Council," said Gaunt, almost apologetically. "And there are twenty-four there. I do trust a week's notice won't pose too much of a bother for you, Headmistress, or that it will interfere with the school year."

"Not at all, Lord Gaunt," said Katelyn quietly, silently exulting. This saved her the bother of calling a Great Council herself, and it would neatly set up a situation where she could crush Gaunt's reputation and scheming in the eyes of all nobility. It was all but perfect. Admittedly, the fact that Gaunt called it before her meant that he would have the right to speak first, but that would just make him fall all the harder.

"Excellent. It shall be a worthwhile council, I assure you."

"I have no doubt of that." If Gaunt thought it would be a masterful opportunity to spring whatever he was planning, then she would prove him wildly wrong.

The elf-wine tasted much better to Katelyn. She poured herself another glass, and savoured every drop.

Afternoon faded into evening, and the Christmas feast ground to a halt. The Canmores left first, bidding fond farewells to Katelyn and Katherine. Young Torque followed in their heels. The professors drifted off. Teams of house-elfs started prowling the vacated seats, collecting empty dishes and cleaned food platters. The still-prodigious quantities of food that remained would be sent down to the poor of Hogsmeade.

At the seventh hour of the evening, Gaunt rose to leave as well, bidding Katelyn a polite farewell and a promise to see her at the Great Council in a week's time. Skadi and Lord Black followed him as well.

On his way out, Gaunt stopped in the doorway, and glanced back into the hall, at Katelyn, at Sir Cadogan and the dozing Trilby, and particularly at the Weasleys.

His eyes narrowed, and his mouth curved in a cruel smirk as he turned on his heel and left.


	12. Reprisal

The door slammed shut behind Gaunt and his companions, as they stepped out into the drifting snow.

"Yet more snow," tutted Gaunt, drawing his robes more closely around his body. They started down the length of the courtyard, towards Hogsmeade and to a place permitting Apparation. Skadi walked, oblivious to the cold, her head constantly darting from side to side as she sniffed at the air. Horatio Black walked with the aid of his stick, in grim silence.

"I would have expected Katelyn to at least put up some kind of protest against the Great Council," said Gaunt, once they were safely out of the school gates, and after he had whispered "_Muffliato,_" to the air round them. "She should only be able to lose from it. Why wouldn't she try to impede it?" His eyes gleamed with amusement. "Do you think she hopes to turn it to her advantage? What does she imagine she can do?" His eyes fixed on Horatio Black, in a mocking gaze that demanded a response. "Any theories, Lord Black? Can you claim to know her so well as to speculate on her motives?"

Horatio, after a pause, said, quietly, "I'm afraid I wouldn't presume to speculate on the Headmistress's motives, my lord. I don't know her, she..."

"Wouldn't you?" interrupted Gaunt harshly. "Why, I imagined you must have been on _excellent_ terms with her, the way you hemmed and hawed when deciding on a side these past few years, _despite_ your family being a banner house of mine's." Gaunt's face twisted with cold anger. "Divided loyalties, Lord Black? A debt of friendship to Katelyn Canmore superseding your debt to your liege lord? Or something more sinister? Doubts about my vision, perchance?"

"I wouldn't ..."

"But you did. And you forced me to take corrective measures, _Horatio_. Measures that will only be undone by your unflagging obedience in the months to come."

Horatio crumpled then, all his feeble resistance gone, and he said, in a whisper choked with tears, "I...oh gods, please, my lord, I'll obey your every command, I'll be your most obedient servant, just … just please give me back my ..."

"On the condition that I receive your allegiance in the tumultuous months that will assuredly follow, then, at the end of these months..." Gaunt savoured the pause, drawing it out and watching Horatio squirm. "...Then, and only then, will I return your son and heir, Horatio. Whole and unharmed. Elsewise, he shall be returned in _pieces_." Gaunt barked with laughter at Horatio's face. "How old is he, Horatio? Five? Six? It wouldn't do to deprive him of his family for too long, would it? Don't fail him. His mother must be beside herself with grief and fear. Give her what reassurance you can … _if_ you feel you can live up to that reassurance."

Horatio nodded frantically.

"Good man. I knew I could rely on you, even in the most dire straits." Gaunt glanced around him, and tested the air with one gloved finger. "Why, I think we're outwith the Apparation-dispelling range. Why don't you go home to your wife now, Horatio? Give her the good news."

Horatio swallowed, nodded once more, and then vanished, leaving only his footprints in the snow to indicate where he had been.

"Gutless fool," growled Skadi, who had remained silent throughout the entire conversation. "Were I he, your entrails would lie across the snow for threatening my family. But he whimpers and shrivels up like a dead leaf."

"Not at all. He knows he's no match for me in a fight. No one is," said Gaunt matter-of-factly. "I have him by that which he cherishes most. He will not resist me, lest it get damaged. Not all of us have your resolve, my lady."

"Instil it in them. Better to be challenged by the strong than to rule the weak."

"But the weak are tremendously useful, short-term. And I need only show them their own former strength before they begin to exercise it." Gaunt shook his head. "Why do so many of them not comprehend that what I intend is for their own good? Why do they remain under the shadow of cattle, when they need but destroy them with one damn sweep?" Gaunt paused, breathing heavily with suppressed fury.

"I will return to my pack," said Skadi. "We'll continue to patrol the forests around your hold. We shall come when you call."

"Yes," said Gaunt. "Good. And when I'll have need of you … when I stamp out the resistance between myself and wizardry's throne, and when the muggle kingdoms are mine for the plucking … you shall have your hunt. You and your pack will have their fill of blood. As per our agreement."

"A Gaunt _does_ honour his debts." Skadi smiled as well, her canines gleaming gold and silver in the darkness. Then she Apparated away, the snowflakes in the air around her rushing to fill the vacuum left in her wake with a clap of thunder.

Gaunt Apparated away in turn, to his home.

Gaunt Manor was a great and desolate place, built for a family many times larger, and filled with dust and skittering shadows, maintained only by the few house elfs Gaunt retained. He despised the old creaky place, seeing it as a representation of the decay that had gripped wizardry as a result of the Masquerade. He only ever bothered with the place when hosting parties and gatherings. His real home was quite different.

He reappeared by the side of a small loch in the heart of the Highlands, shrouded with mist and covered with the thinnest layer of snow. Thick swathes of dark green forest surrounded the nameless loch, the only distinguishing feature of which was the crannog protruding from the southern bank.

The crannog was a circular wood and thatch dwelling that rested atop an artificial platform in the middle of the water. A moss-slicked scaffolding of timbers, packed with layers of stone and peat, rose from the glimmering water surface, supporting the dwelling and the twenty-metre long bridge connecting it with the mainland. The dwelling at the bridge's end was some ten metres in diameter, and had a cone shaped roof of thatch supported by wooden beams from within.

It was secluded. It was easy to maintain. It hearkened back to the days of the old wizards and their dominion over the muggles. It was perfect for Gaunt.

He stepepd briskly across the bridge, summoning a ball of light from the tip of his wand to help him make his way across the dark wooden surface. He reached the dwelling, unlocked the door (which was barred with the most powerful spells Gaunt knew) and walked inside.

He lit the fireplace in the centre with a flick of his wand and a murmur of "_Incendio_,", sending purple flames dancing up as far as the ceiling and lighting up the cosy confines of the crannog. He hung up his heavy outer robes on a peg by the entrance and sat down at the desk on the other side of the huge room that made up all of the interior. His plain wooden bed sat in one side, and a dresser and cooking hearth in the other.

He laid his wand down on the desk, slipped off his ring and amulet, and pulled open one of the bottom drawers. From within, he drew out a great silver dish filled to the brim with shifting silver fluid.

He picked up the wand, and tapped it gently against the side of his head, teasing out a gossamer strand of silver fluid from one ear, copying his memory with the aid of the magics that surrounded the area around any Penseive.

With his other hand, he rummaged around in another drawer until he found four thin sticks of wood from an elder tree, tied into a square frame. He picked it out and balanced it upright against a stack of books on his desk.

Twirling his wand in his hand in a complex, shifting pattern, he angled the tip at the frame, still coiled around with silver memories, and hissed, "_Animaspeculara._"

The silver memory shot at the frame's centre and coalesced rapidly into a silvery mirror, that revealed the memory that Gaunt had drawn out. His perspective, opening the doors, seeing the hall stretched before him, seeing the guests gathered about the table.

He muttered as he willed the memory to focus on the guests, and scanned the faces of the nobles present until he saw what he was looking for. That oaf Hughnon, guffawing and swilling wine. And beside him, two blood-bastards. Abominations of mixed wizard and vermin blood.

Gaunt smiled a wintery smile. He had guessed that the Christmas feast would serve as a cover for Katelyn to meet with her informants. And that they would stay for the feast afterwards.

Yes, her informants. Had she been so blind as to think he didn't suspect he was being surveyed the whole time? Had she really put that much blind trust in the skill of her agents? Evidently she had, and now he knew who they were. To their credit, he had never been able to guess who they might be before. All he had been able to determine was that they worked as a pair, and that left several options open to speculation.

He was relieved to find that it wasn't the Malfoy twins. He still hoped for that family's redemption; it wasn't the twin's fault that their father had gone mad in his senility and manifested that by railing against Gaunt. The Dementor attack Gaunt had directed was really an act of mercy in that light. It had merely concluded the drawn-out destruction of Orion's mind, and removed him as a complication.

But the Weasley bastards … Gaunt had no compunctions against killing half-bloods.

Judging by Katelyn's too-easy acceptance of his proposed Great Council, she must have thought the Weasleys had information and evidence against Gaunt that she could present at the council, to reveal his crimes in full and destroy his reputation.

Of course, they weren't really crimes, any right-thinking wizard could see _that_. But too many wizards were still unconvinced and fearful of the clarity Gaunt offered them. Reason and rightness would not sway them in the final tally, against the evidence the Weasleys could bring forth.

But whatever the evidence was, he had to eliminate the bearers before they could present it. And tonight would be as good a time as any.

Finding them might pose a bother. But that was what the frame was for.

The frame didn't offer the same clarity of memory as a normal Penseive. But it had the great advantage of allowing certain Divination spells to cast on it.

Gaunt pointed his wand once more at the figures of the Weasleys, and said "_Aliolocus._"

Instantly, the observant part of his mind was tugged away from his body and hurled away through space, tracking the persons of the Weasley bastards, following threads in the magical plane and zeroing in on their location.

It was done quickly. Gaunt's mind's eye stared down at a old stone tower in a clearing in a forest, light filtering out from the windows and cracks in the stone. The spell coolly informed Gaunt that the tower was a mere eight miles or so to the south of his crannog.

Only eight miles? Audacious. Useful as a vantage point. And terribly risky. Out here, there would be no-one to help them.

Gaunt put away the frame, dispelling the Memory-Mirror Charm as he did so, and walked back to the door, and picked up his heavy outer robes from the peg and donned them once again. He'd heard that revenge was best served cold. To his mind, murder in the depths of winter was best done at a reasonable body temperature.

He stepped out back into the night, closing the door behind him, and began across the bridge. He had no fixed image of the tower in his mind, and Apparating there could be risky. His eagle-form would take him there.

Halfway across the bridge, his thoughts slipped back to the feast, to Katelyn and her daughter and the bickering crowd of wizards around the table. And most pertinently, the muggle knight.

That was the final insult, the surest sign that Katelyn had forsaken all claims to the nobility of her position. How could she even countenance letting something like _that_ into Hogwarts? The mere presence of the knight at Hogwarts made Gaunt's skin crawl. It was a travesty. A violation. An unforgivable act, to permit vermin like that access to the very seat of wizardry in Britain.

The knight had to be removed. Once the Great Council was done and Gaunt ruled wizarding Britain, his very first act would be to...

But why after the council? Why permit the thing to live any longer than it had to?

Gaunt paused there, considering his options. Murdering the knight himself wasn't an option, with the situation as precarious as it was. So was any act that left no doubt that murder (clearing vermin from the castle, rather) had taken place. It had to be discreet, to be open to interpretation, to have plausibly come about as a combination of ill luck and the knight's ignorance.

Gaunt had heard that wild Dementors were particularly hungry during winter.

He stopped on the bridge, and looked out across the loch's black waters, at the purple sky cut off by a black band of mountains. He drew in breath, and loosed one haunting whistle that rang across the waters, reinforced by wandless and voiceless magic self-learned by Gaunt in his dealings with Dementors.

He waited while the echoes of the whistle faded into silence.

And then, after a few minutes, a dark hole in the universe glided across the loch surface.

Its ragged cloak fluttered in the slight breeze. Its breath came out as a death-rattle. It seemed to suck out whatever warmth existed in its vicinity, aggravating the winter. It stopped before Gaunt, hovering in the air scant metres from him.

Gaunt looked at the Dementor, and stared levelly at the hood covering its face, at where its eyes would have been had the creature possessed any such organs.

"At Hogwarts, there is a muggle," he said in a commanding tone. "A knight, clad in armour. He is a dangerous element. He must be removed from the equation. Am I understood?"

The Dementor rattled in response, a scratched breath like the whisper of a breeze on an open tomb. In Gaunt's mind, half-formed and chillingly cold, came the response. _Understood._

"Then do not delay," said Gaunt sharply. "The knight must not live past tonight."

The Dementor rattled in response, and fluttered away as quickly as it had came.

Gaunt shuddered and moved on. The Dementors, monsters seemingly formed from the darkest nightmares of childhood, left him cold. Even with his iron will and clarity of purpose, even he was unsettled by the emotion-eaters.

He reached the bridge's end, and morphed mid-stride into an eagle the colour of blood. He flew above the tree-tops, flying in a straight line to the south.

* * *

Sir Cadogan stood up unsteadily from the table, brushing crumbs off his breastplate. To his left, Trilby snored into the reamins of a slice of pear tart. Only a few wizards were left in the hall, and half of them were in a similar state of wakefulness to Trilby. The fires in the several stone fireplaces along each wall were steadily dying out.

"Lad?" Cadogan reached down and shook Trilby's shoulder gently.

Trilby said "Mmssgthd," in the back of his throat and resumed snoring.

"He had a fair few glasses of wine and maist of a flagon, sir knight," said Katherine, who was a bit flushed herself. "It's potent stuff the elfs brew. Leave him. I'll make sure he gets tae his bed."

"A few glasses and a flagon," muttered Cadogan. "Honestly. That wouldn't get my _eyelashes_ drunk ..." He suddenly slipped, and caught himself on the table before he fell to the floor.

"It might get my feet drunk, though," amended Sir Cadogan. "Ugh. I'm going for a short walk. I'll get him to his bed when I come back."

"Where are ye going?"

"I mislike going to bed with a foggy head. I'm going for a short walk outside to get some air."


	13. Knightfall

Clouds jostled and drifted in the sky, revealing a rare expanse of naked night studded with stars. A silver demi-moon hung in the blackness, casting a dim cold light over the surface of the Hogwarts lake.

The edge of the lake became a mess of ripples, as Sir Cadogan stooped down and dunked and shook his head vigorously in the freezing water. He dipped his head up, gasping for breath, and then plunged it back in again. The sound of splashing was the only sound breaking the night's silence, with all else reduced to murmurs and rustles in the forest around the knight.

He stopped, once the shock of the water had sufficiently wiped clean the alcoholic fog obscuring his mind, and rose up, plucking up his greathelm from where it lay at his feet.

From behind him, distant laughter and the chink of pewter mugs came from Hogwarts, where the castle rose into the sky like a mountain, the countless lit windows across it creating new, warmer constellations.

Cadogan slammed the greathelm back onto his head, and started up the winding path through the trees. Low-hanging branches brushed at him as he strode along the trail, the way ahead cast into pools of shadow by the overhanging trees. In this part of the Forbidden Forest, unlike in other parts, the trees grew thick and cloistered, making passage a claustrophobic proposition.

To one side, Cadogan saw one of the Hippogriffs stalking proudly through the undergrowth, a furry tail wriggling out one side of its beak. Its feathers gleamed bronze under the moonlight.

He walked on. He would make it back to the castle, drag Trilby to his bed in the cottage, and fall asleep himself and remain in that state until midday.

He would have to start doing more walking. Cadogan's torso had already possessed the dimensions of a barrel before he came to Hogwarts; he didn't want to grow too big for his armour.

It wasn't just walking he wanted to do either, Cadogan realised. He was becoming restless, feeling confined by Hogwarts and his assignment. He wanted to be out in the world again, away from all these wizards and their demented blood-based politics, and out helping the helpless. Help that he should have rendering all this time, he thought guiltily, instead of gorging himself and gawping at magic tricks.

He decided then that he'd leave tomorrow. He'd get out of the Headmistress's hair, pack his pony's saddle-bags, and set out on the road again on the never-ending quest of a knight-errant; and to hell with any king who instructed him otherwise. And Trilby...

Cadogan sighed, deep in thought. Trilby seemed to like it here. He had a friend, perhaps more than that, in the Headmistress's daughter, Cadogan had noticed. It would be kind to let the lad choose whether or not he wanted to stay. Who knows, his squire might be able to do some good here if he stayed, and muggledom would still have a representative at Hogwarts.

But if Trilby stayed, he would be at the mercy of those opposed to all muggles. And Cadogan refused to leave his squire in a situation like that, where wizards like that Gaunt would be after his blood. But if he made Trilby come with him, or even if his squire chose to come with him, would the lad resent him for it?

What was his best option? Leave with Trilby? Leave without him? Stay here for good?

He was so deep in thought, he almost didn't notice the Hippogriff explode upwards in a flurry of feathers. The creature had suddenly perked its head at something approaching. It had spat out the remains of the ferret and loosed one alarmed squawk before flying off at fast as its wings would take it.

Cadogan turned and blinked at the creature, puzzled. Then he brushed it off, and walked back up along the path to Hogwarts.

He broke the edge of the forest, and emerged onto the long snowy slope that ran up towards the castle. He took one trudge, and then paused to hug his cloak closer around him. The night had suddenly seemed to become even chillier than usual.

His thoughts stole back absently to the Hippogriff as he kept on walking. He had seen that sort of sudden flight before in normal birds. Put a flock of them on a bush, and then let a fox or arrow spring at them, and they'd all fly off like that. Typical fight-or-flight response to any predator.

A quiet, observant, inconvenient part of Cadogan's brain whispered, _What sort of predator did that Hippogriff just flee __from, then?_

Cadogan stopped, standing stock-still, his hand creeping to the handle of his poleaxe, sheathed securely in his belt.

From behind him, from the forest, above the shrill whistle of the wind, he became aware of a subtle and insidious rattle, like breath passing through a corpse's lungs.

He turned slowly, grasping the axe handle, and peered into the forest. There was nothing but gently rustling leaves in the modst of pools of shadow. But as Cadogan peered, he realised that one of the patches of shadow seemed unnatural, twisted, as if something he couldn't discern waited within.

"Who's there?" snapped Sir Cadogan. ""Stand forward and unveil yourself, rogue. I am not accustomed to being snuck up upon."

The horrible rattle sounded again, and the shadow _moved._

Cadogan looked at nothing, nothing but empty air that seemed to ripple as something invisible moved forwards, and he felt an unnatural chill settle across his soul, a sense of horrible foreboding and remembrance combined.

"Whatever you are, you shall stand down," he snarled, his voice tinged with an unfamiliar emotion – fear. He drew out his poleaxe and waved it, futilely. The something came closer. "Stand _down_, I say!"

The rattle came again, hungry and amused, and the ripple in the air came yet closer. Cadogan eye's flicked down, and he realised that the thing was withering the frosted grass in its wake. With a scream, he charged, his poleaxe swinging.

He swung it through the air at the invisible monster – and stopped midswing, hit by a sudden surge of memory that tore up from the depths of his mind and ripped at him like something tangible. Cursing, he pulled the poleaxe back for another swing, and there was the drawn-in sound of one horrendous breath.

Cadogan felt icy fingers locked around his soul, digging into his mind, sharper and infinitely more horrible than the lake water. He shuddered with fear, and jabbed the poleaxe point at empty air, and missed by a mile.

The Dementor, invisible to muggles, slowly rose above him, and a clammy grey hand reached up to its hood. It drew the hood back...

...Memory and horror exploded around Sir Cadogan, his conscious gripped by something beyond nightmares, his subconscious panicking and helpless like a trapped animal. He sank to his knees, confused and helpless before an unfightable enemy.

The creature drew closer, exuding a wave of pure terror and coldness, and rattling with hunger all the while.

In Cadogan's mind, fires roared along ancient thatch, and screaming filled his ears.

* * *

"Did the knight say where he was going?" said Katelyn, sitting in her office and nursing her last Firewhisky of the evening. Her daughter sat across from her, staring out at the moon that hung suspended in the sky, visible through the open window.

"Just out for a wander to clear his head, mum. Taking the night air, ye ken."

"In winter? Madman. Absolute madman." Katelyn tutted, and got up and walked over to the window. She looked down across the spread of snow-bound grass leading down to the forest edge, and down from there to the lake.

She frowned, and peered. The shadows were wrong at one point along the line of trees. Something gleamed there. Something that looked like a suit of armour. And above that …

"Merlin's blood!" she spat, throwing aside her glass and drawing her wand in one rapid motion. She leapt up onto the window ledge, a sudden gust of wind making her robes flap. "Katherine, _stay here! _Dae _nothing!_"

"Mither, what..."

"_Iteagavosa!_" Katelyn's wand blazed with light with one swift flick, and Katelyn leapt from the window, flying with magic's aid, her robes streaming behind her as she sped to the distant distorted shadows.

* * *

_He fell back through madness and terror, into shadow, into memories he had fought against all his life._

_He was four years old. His home blazed around him._

_Time had dulled some aspects of his past. In others, it remained horribly clear. He couldn't remember where his village had been, or what force had come upon it like a ravening wolf. He didn't know whether he was Scottish or English or Welsh by origin, or whether there had been a war, a band of raiders, or some dispute between lords that had been settled with naked steel._

_To the village it made no difference, save to the colours of the tabards worn by the men who slaughtered and burned in the night, and in time even these were stained red._

_He stood by the hearth by the far wall in the single-roomed cottage that was his family's homestead, staring around him in confusion at the roar of flames and the screams of villagers and harsh laughter of the pillagers from without. Between a crack that ran through the door, he saw leaping flames. His father was running to the door, next to which he kept his quarterstaff and cloak. The man was taller than Cadogan would ever be, with blond hair turning grey with age, his son's blue-grey eyes, and a face lined with weariness and determination. His mother was picking his infant sister out of her crib. The woman had long black hair and matching dark eyes, and wore a faded shift._

_Thunder rolled and horses screamed. His father yelled at Cadogan and his mother to get ready to start running, when the door suddenly flew in with one awesome blow._

_The tall, thin figure that stood in the doorway gleamed all over with fire, flames mirrored off his shining armour. Only his eyes were visible past the slits in his helmet, all else was obscured. In his hand, he bore a claymore, a massive two-handed sword._

_For one wild moment, the young Cadogan thought it was a Knight of the Round Table, a hero of legend spoken of by the village's old story-teller, come forth to save them all._

_The claymore blurred and sheared through the old staff, and took his father's head off. His head thumped against the earth floor, hair jerking, eyes glazed over, before the knight kicked it away._

_His mother screamed, and threw herself at the knight, putting herself between the figure in steel and her children. The knight laughed and rammed the claymore forward, impaling her through the stomach. She fell, dying as she choked on blood._

_Cadogan ran straight at the knight. The sword was held low and angled to the ground, drops of blood running off it to the floor, and the knight dashed out one iron fist. The blow cracked into Cadogan's face, throwing him bodily across the room, and planting him face-first into the embers of the hearth. He was too shocked, too stunned, too winded to scream._

_From a great distance, he heard the crying of his infant sister._

_There was a sound from the sword, and the crying was cut off. In the corner of his vision, Cadogan saw the knight glance around the cottage once more, at the bodies of his parents and at the prone Cadogan, looking for anything worth taking._

_The knight flung the claymore across his back and strode out without a backwards glance, laughing and calling out to some unseen figure, "Useless goddamn peasants. Not worth the killing if there's nothing taking." He was answered with a bark of laughter, and vanished into the fiery night._

_Cadogan lay face down in the red embers, his breath coming back to him by degrees, his faced seared with agony as he struggled to stay still and not to cry, for fear the knight might come back._

_

* * *

_

Katelyn saw the scene more clearly as she sped closer.

The knight was prone on the ground, his poleaxe fallen to one side, with a Dementor looming over him like an angel of death. The monster was three metres tall, and had a shape that could only be described in the most general terms as human. It was skeleton-thin, poised like a predator, and clothed in ragged, fluttering, scraps of shadow. The cloth around its mouth sucked in and fluttered as the monster drew breath.

A scabrous hand gently pulled off the knight's helm, revealing his scarred face, blank with silent horror. The Dementor rattled, and bent over him, its exposed mouth drawing closer to his...

"_Dementor!_" screamed Katelyn, halting in mid air ten metres away with a billow of robes, holding her wand at the ready. The Dementor looked up and hissed.

"You're done with him," she snarled. "I'm your target now. _Expecto Patronum!_"

* * *

_Memory flowed on from one atrocity to the event thereafter, freed by the Dementor's terrible force._

_He was seven. He was in London._

_He had finally staggered free from his village's ruins. He was the only survivor._

_The ragged, blank child with no second name walked to London. It was by pure chance he got there; he had no idea where the roads led, or the dangers that prowled them (though he now had a better idea)._

_He had survived there for three long years, in the city that grew and grew each year, that drew all wealth and travellers and dispossessed to its confines. It was a city of angles and shadows, a city where death and reward would walk hand in hand and be fought over by the desperate and ambitious alike._

_Knights had arrived in the city. The street-child Cadogan, hardened and made brutal, thought there might be wealth amongst their saddle-bags._

_He found where their stables were, and crept past the few knights and dozy squires near them. He had a cutting knife out, ready to swipe through the bag's fastenings and to sprint away with them into the endless twisting alleys._

_He made it to one horse, and readied the knife. As he held it poised, a shadow fell over him._

_He turned at roughly the same moment as the horse's owner clouted him around the head._

_

* * *

_

A silver osprey shot forth from Katelyn's wand, formed from a million points of blazing silver light given solid form, fuelled by the memory of Katherine's first stumbling steps towards Katelyn's open arms. It keened as it swooped down and struck at the Dementor with flashing silver claws, sending the dark creature darting backwards with a furious hiss.

Katelyn touched down on the ground, and ran towards Sir Cadogan even as she continued to direct the Patronus with her wand. It circled the Dementor, which turned to face the Patronus, exuding what could only be described as alarm.

The Patronus dived again and tore at the Dementor, which recoiled from the mere presence of the osprey and scuttled back rapidly into the tree cover.

"That's right. Run. _Run_, ye abomination," hissed Katelyn. The osprey screeched, and dove again.

* * *

_Cadogan was a squire, from until he was seven until he was perhaps eighteen._

_The knight who had clouted him in the stables was his master. His name was Sir Iwan._

_He had taken in the ragged boy, secretly impressed that he had slipped past his notice. He had spoken to the boy, given him a heel of bread, and finally, in the wee hours of the evening, asked the boy if he'd be interested in becoming his squire._

_Cadogan had sat bolt upright at that, his eyes fixed and shocked, his mouth tightly shut._

"_Me? A squire? To become a knight?" he had managed in a toneless voice after a moment. The knight considered him, with eyes as grey and opaque as stone._

"_Should you prove yourself worthy and skilled, and should you earn your right to knighthood, then you shall become a knight, if such is your ambition," he said, in a light and measured Welsh accent._

_Cadogan had sat there, on a ledge in the stable, his eyes looking into the distance. Then, with more force and fervour than any seven-year old had any right to muster:_

"_Yes, it is. More than anything."_

_And so it had begun._

_It hadn't taken long for Cadogan to grasp that Sir Iwan was an eccentric among knights, that he was often thought of as mad. Cadogan didn't care. In fact, it suited him all the better. Sir Iwan had no land, no lord's favour, no damsel awaiting him, or any other squires. He was a knight-errant, sworn to travel the world on a ceaseless quest to fight evil. This wasn't a usual position, to put it mildly. _

"_What you're used to, and what you see everyday, is knights as they **are**," he would lecture Cadogan, in between the endless bouts and sessions where Cadogan was trained with sword and axe and spear and got a thousand bruises and cuts in exchange for his education, where reading and writing in English and Latin was drummed into Cadogan's head, where the code of chivalry was repeated countless times until Cadogan could recite in his sleep. "What I intend to make you, boy, is a knight as they **should** be."_

"_That's just what I want, sir," said the growing, gawky squire eagerly._

"_Don't interrupt. Now, a knight as they should be is a knight spoken of in the code of chivalry. Summarise that for me."_

"_It … a real knight does good. He helps the helpless, he..."_

"_That's it," said Sir Iwan. "That's all of it as makes no odds. We help the helpless. Everything else that's important is just shades of that."_

_It was a long education. They travelled the length and breadth of Britain, fighting bandits in Northumbria, challenging power-crazed lords in Sussex, coming to the aid of the peasantry in Argyll. They crossed the channel a few times and did the same thing in France. Sir Iwan kept him and Cadogan moving like men possessed, like he was also trying to outrun his past in search of something better._

_Cadogan was eighteen when they went to the Holy Land._

_

* * *

_

The Patronus struck for the last time, and the Dementor turned and fled. It vanished between the trees in its haste to escape, and abruptly rose above the trees and into the sky, becoming a diminishing dark shadow.

Katelyn breathed out, and willed away the keening Patronus. Then she turned her attention to Sir Cadogan.

"Sir knight?" she said, alarmed. The knight's face was waxy and drawn, eyes closed and breathing faintly.

"_Lumos,_" she muttered, sending a globe of light into the air just above her head. "_Wingardium Leviosa,_" she said, pointing her wand at Cadogan, and gently floating him up off the ground, using the spell as a makeshift stretcher.

"I ken just the thing for Dementor attacks," she said softly, walking back up to the school and bringing Cadogan bobbing gently behind her.

* * *

_In Outremer, the sun beat down relentlessly, cooking the men who migrated there from Europe intending to claim these lands for Christendom._

_Nearly a thousand of these men were laying siege to a Mamluk fort, a stone edifice that rose out of the ground at a critical junction between a fast-flowing river and a line of mountains._

_Cadogan was tensed and ready, clad in boiled leather armour and bearing a battle-axe and shield, as he, along with Sir Iwan and sixty other knights and squires and foot soldiers, pushed two siege towers towards one of the fort's walls. Arrows rained down upon them, striking into shields and sand and hissing as they swept through the air, one impacting in the throat of a squire next to Cadogan, who fell with a frantic splutter and choke._

"_Into the towers!" roared an old knight-commander, leading this first assault on the western walls. Other groups led other assaults, with mangonels and rams and ladders. The distant sounds of metal on metal and cries indicated that some of them were already well underway. "Into the tower! Charge the heretic scum as soon as the gangplank falls! For God! For Christ's salvation! And for your own souls!" The men around him cheered with battle-lust and fanatic fervour. Cadogan didn't join in, instead mentally running through all the tricks with an axe Sir Iwan had taught him._

_Groups of men men swept up into the towers as they drew closer to the wall, Cadogan being one of them. He turned his head as he ran, and saw that he and Sir Iwan had become separated, the knight having chosen the tower to Cadogan's left. But it was too late to go back now; Cadogan knew that they would just have to meet up on the other side._

_He emerged into the uppermost level, along with several other sweating tense men, keeping a steady grasp on their weapons. Outside, drums rolled and men screamed and arrows sliced at the air. The towers drew closer._

_The tower stopped. One of the men beside Cadogan hacked at the rope holding the gangplank up, and it crashed down onto the wall. The men in the tower cheered and lunged, their weapons raised as they bore down upon the fort's defenders, with arming sword and flail meeting scimitar and spear with a scream of tortured metal and torn-free sparks._

_As Cadogan ran along the gangplank, he saw that the other tower had met the wall as well, and that Sir Iwan was at the head of the charge, his sword out and gleaming as he dove at the enemy._

_The enemy, Cadogan realised with a sickening lurch, who had prepared for that particular tower. A waiting cauldron tipped as the attackers charged, and a wave of flaming, steaming oil swept down upon the leading attackers like a tidal wave._

_Cadogan watched, horrified, Sir Iwan get hit by the bulk of the oil, saw him go up like a torch as his skin fell away, saw his sword fall free and saw the men behind him scream and fall, saw his master pitch off the gangplank's side and fall the thirty feet to the hard ground below._

_But he had no time to scream, no time to go to his aid, for his feet were still running and the first Mamluk was already on him with a gleaming scimitar, and Cadogan lashed crazily with his axe to counter it._

_Blood ran along the length of the fort wall._

_

* * *

_

"Headmistress Canmore?" groaned the rudely-awoken Trilby as she marched briskly through the main door. "What's going …? Oh gods! Sir Cadogan! What hap..."

"A Dementor," hissed Katelyn, her face showing the strain of the maintained Levitation Charm. "He needs to get to the infirmary. There's a sustance there that'll help him."

"But..."

"Take his feet," she ordered. "Take some of the weight off me."

Trilby hurried forwards to take Cadogan's legs. Katelyn continued her brisk march, through another door and up the winding stairs to the infirmary.

* * *

_Astonishingly, miraculously, horrifically, Sir Iwan had survived._

_He was crushed by his fall to the groud, both his legs and one arm broken on impact. He had landed on a broken arrow, the point of which was driven into him through the rings in his chainmail and jutted out the other side of his torso. His blackened flesh sloughed off his bones, his face was a seared ruin._

_And in spite of it all, he had been found by other troops as he tried to claw his way loose of the arrow, had been taken to the infirmary, and had refused to die until Cadogan returned wounded and weary. He had then shouted a frightened orderly into coming over and helping him the final task of helping him hold his sword._

"_Defend … the helpless … even at the cost of your life," croaked Sir Iwan through his ravaged throat as he grasped his sword in his hand, gently supported by the orderly as he lay in bed. He had the blade laid across Cadogan's left shoulder. "Speak the truth … in all things and all … matters. Fear shall not rule you. Dishonour … shall not know you."_

_Cadogan knelt there on the sand, underneath the whispering cloth roof of the medical tent. He bled from a dozen small wounds, his form plastered with sweat and blood, his own and the enemy's._

"_Rise a … knight. Rise a knight errant … a knight of the lonely road. Rise, and rise … forevermore." The last phrase came out as a painful rattle, and the sword shifted to Cadogan's other shoulder. Cadogan rose._

"_Take my horse," whispered Sir Iwan after he had shooed away the orderly. "Take my armour. Go back … to Britain." He leant back into the bed, his breath attesting to agony beyond endurance, his speech interspersed with pauses where he struggled to overcome the pain. "Do as the oath bids … you. Never yield. Be a … knight as one should be, Cadogan."_

_He had died shortly after, with his last word possibly being "Gwenhwyfar," a last fragment of fond memory passing lips before the end. Cadogan left the tent, the encampment, and Outremer behind forever._

_The fort, he heard later, never fell._

_

* * *

_

Trilby looked askance at the goblet of brown fluid Katelyn gave him to administer to Sir Cadogan, who lay in his armour on an infirmary bed.

"What exactly is this?" he said with some trepidation.

"It's a drink, distilled from beans that grow in the lands beyond the sunset," said Katelyn distractedly. "The wizarding ambassador from yan of their nations brings us some every time he comes around."

"Lands beyond the sunset?"

"Never mind them, they're no important. Just make sure he drinks it all. I'll be back soon."

She swept out of the room, and Trilby began forcing the drink between Cadogan's lips.

A minute or so later, life appeared in the knight, as his eyes slowly opened, and his mouth opened to take in more of the fluid. Trilby made sure his master drank it all.

"Sir?" he ventured. "Are you alright? What happened out there?"

Cadogan stared into space for a while, still lost in his own thoughts. Finally, he spoke.

"You understand, lad."

"What?"

"That there has to be one. There _has_ to be a true knight!" Sir Cadogan's gaze was focused and fierce, and his voice trembled. "You're my damn squire, and Iwan's damn grand-squire! Of course you understand!"

"Sir, I..."

"There has to be a knight better than that which exists, better than the sort which reaves and kills innocent families," snarled Sir Cadogan, moisture beading in the corner of his eyes. "And if we won't be that knight, then who will be? There has to be something good out there, something that helps the helpless, which never hesitates to do good, which never hesitates for an ideal. We have to … have to ..." He fell silent. Then:

"Could you give me a few minutes, lad? If someone comes to check on me, just keep them distracted. I just need a moment."

Trilby left, and Cadogan pulled himself into a sitting position.

His mind still had the residue of horror left by that creature, horror aggravated by the memories he had buried.

But not all the memories that had been sealed way as time went by had that same darkness.

_It was eight years ago, when he had still had a horse instead of a pony, when he had still been squireless. He had returned to London, to the bristling port-city, to the city of alleys which had grown in the decades since he had last been there._

_He had stabled his horse, and was just preparing to find a tavern in the city, when he had seen himself in the corner of his eye. A skinny, furtive boy, eyeing up the horse and believing he hadn't been spotted. Cadogan in miniature._

_The boy had crept forward, just as Cadogan had done, and Cadogan readied himself to do as Sir Iwen had done. To take the boy into his service, and to ensure a knight-errant would carry his legacy._

_He had prepared a hand with which to clip the boy's ear, and walked forwards under the fresh London sun._

He called for Trilby. The lad peered in, and walked to beside his master.

"Are you alright, sir?"

"I've been better. But I've also been worse."

A reflective pause. Then:

"A question for you, my lad. Something to exercise that brain of yours. If a creature existed - a creature that could sap the will from a man in seconds, a creature of pure evil that sucked all happiness from the world - does it follow that someone would try to use the thing as a weapon?"

Trilby stared, aghast.

"Are you ... what attacked you out there, sir? Are you saying someone tried to assassinate you with a magical monster? But ... who? Why?"

"We have a new purpose, Trilby," said Cadogan firmly. "Something to while away our time here productively."

"What's that?"

"We will find whoever directed that monster, assuming it wasn't an accident. And should such a person exist, then I will be repaid in the blood price." Cadogan slammed his clenched gauntlet down onto the bedside table with a slam. "_And none other._"


	14. Counterplot

Katelyn, standing before the fireplace in her office, drew a small ceramic pot off the mantle, the innards of which glimmered green.

She laid it down on her desk, and reached across the desk for a spare piece of parchment and a quill. Dipping the quill tip in ink, she touched it to the parchment and wrote,

_The situation has developed. I need to to talk to you two, post-haste. - K.C_

She affixed the message with an intricate, flowing symbol; then sprinkled some of the Floo Powder from the pot onto the middle. She carefully folded the parchment into a square, the corners touching in the middle, and she folded it again. She then turned back to the fire, said "Malfoy Manor, Opal Wing Fireplace," and tossed it in, where it vanished with a flurry of green fire.

After a minute of waiting, the response came on the back of the same piece of parchment, in emerald-green ink, with a similar symbol inscribed next to the text.

_Then come, post-haste._

Katelyn picked up another handful of Floo Powder, tossed it into the fire, repeated the fireplace directions and stepped in.

She reappeared in Malfoy Manor, in the great chamber of the westernmost wing of the vast, sprawling house.

The walls and floor were lined with lush, green tapestries and carpets, usually depicting some revered Malfor ancestor doing something improbably valorous or skillful. Torches burned with steady magical flame in wall-mounted braziers.

The wall facing Katelyn when she emerged was centred with a huge window, beyond which snow and winds tore at the sky. Corvus reclined on the window seat in the recess, turning away from the storm outside to regard Katelyn. Two chairs faced the fireplace, chased with copper and stuffed with goose feathers. In one of them, Hydra Malfoy sat with a book in hand, and raised her head to acknowledge the headmistress.

In the other chair, an old, wizened figure in his dressing gown snored gently.

"Lady Canmore. To what do we owe the pleasure?" said Hydra, placing down her book.

"News that may interest ye. And a proposition I strongly advise ye two to heed."

"What is it, then?" said Corvus. His voice was slightly slurred, from the wine imbibed at the Malfoy's own Christmas feast.

"The knight ye delivered to me was attacked by a Dementor earlier tonight," said Katelyn.

_That_ got their attention.

"He …. but how did that..." said Corvus, sitting bolt-upright and glancing quickly at the old man sleeping in the chair.

"Nachlan paid his 'social call' during the Christmas feast. He saw the knight there, and it disnae take a philosopher to put two and two thegither."

"Defiling guest-right, even for a muggle?" Hydra raised a brow. "How exceedingly vile. The man has no honour left."

"Forget the guest-right. Don't you see what this means?" said Corvus. He had stood up, his face burning with excitement, pacing in his eagerness. "That's evidence we can use against him. Nachlan saw that knight – and that knight was attacked by a Dementor. Our … our father spoke out against Gaunt, and he was attacked by the Dementor." The old man, Orion Malfoy, stirred in his empty sleep. "We suspected, but couldn't prove anything. But that's changed! The latter event can prove the former! We've got evidence now, and we've finally got grounds to see justice done. By all the gods, I can finally challenge that monster to a honour duel – there'll be Gaunt blood spilled for this..."

"Hear me out before ye do onything, lad," said Katelyn firmly. Corvus settled, reluctantly.

"There's mair," she said. "When Gaunt saw the knight, he was furious, livid – but not surprised. He kent that a muggle had come tae Hogwarts. I think he wanted tae see the truth of that with his own een. But if he was forewarned, then who by?" She stepped forward, her expression set.

"Mind how I told you that my assistant, Hadrian Dunbar, had vanished? Gaunt must have gotten to him – he must have extracted the information through threats, or worse, and then murdered him once he had what he wanted."

"Then that's even better," interrupted Hydra crisply. "That's another death chalked up by Gaunt. We can use that as well, we can use that as grounds for settling the matter in a duel. The evidence is circumstantial, I'll admit, but Gaunt can't not explain himself without losing face..."

"I hadn't finished," said Katelyn sharply. The twins fell silent.

"The maist important thing of that whole visit by Gaunt – the critical thing of it – is that Gaunt's making his next move. He's called for a Great Council for the new year. He's going tae demand that wizardry makes a choice there, and he'll likely have the numbers to prevail and assume leadership."

"But … how?" said the stunned Corvus. "I thought he was still playing it safe. He didn't have the support of another noble house, he had to move cautiously..."

"He has House Black. He brought Lord Horatio tae the feast and showed him off like a dancing bear. Him, and a woman as well. I didnae ken her."

Corvus swore quietly.

"Then that settles it," said Hydra. "We challenge him to an honour duel, with all the evidence supporting our grievance, before the Great Council can take place, and we fight to the death. Myself or Corvus will do that – we're the best duellists in wizarding Britain, nobody can deny that, and once he's gone, we can just..."

"Ye're the best duellists, bar Gaunt himself," said Katelyn.

"He's brutal, but unskilled. We can ..."

"No. _Listen_ tae me." Katelyn held her hands before her in a placating gesture. "Here's my proposition, and I must ask that ye hear it all the way through. Just give me your attention, and then ask or interject afterwards. A fair proposal?"

"Silence taken as a yes," said Katelyn after a moment. "Now then. Duelling Gaunt isnae an option – killing him won't dispel his supporters. There's tae much momentum behind them, and they'll unleash an even fiercer storm on Britain if ye gie them a martyr. Besides which ... I'm sorry, ye pair, but Gaunt could cut either one of you tae collops on a bad day. He's got prodigious magical strength, and he's far, far more skilled than ye gie him credit for. Ye'd fight him, and ye'd only humiliate yourself and harm our cause. Rule that out."

"What I've been doing these past years is what we're going to use. I'm going tae take the information collected by the Weasley twins, once it's ready, and spring it on Gaunt at his ain Great Council. He'll lose all his standing, all his fabricated moral high ground, when the full light of his crimes comes tae light, and he'll be supported by none but a few as fanatical as himself. We can cut off the serpent's heid, and crush its body as well."

"The Weasley twins," said Corvus sourly. "You rely on them too much. The whole family is suspect."

"They were the best available for spywork. Nae offence, Corvus, but ye've picked up something of a reputation for … ah … a deficiency in circumspection."

"Blast it all, this isn't going back to that masque ball five years back, is it? All I said was that Tomyn Greengrass was quite clearly conceived of the union between Lord Greengrass and a polecat, and I stand by every word. The man's got a face like a ..."

"My point stands," said Katelyn. "The Weasley twins will have the evidence ready for me by the 30th. But the days in between will be when I need ye pair."

"What for?"

"I don't trust Gaunt to play to plan. I'm certain he's got plans of his ain. And if … _when_ he starts making things more complicated, I'll rely on ye. I'll need ye both tae be ready to respond whenever I need ye. If I need your skills tae bring tae bear at any hour, at any time …"

"Then we'll be ready," sighed Corvus.

"We understand, but I still think that Gaunt could be finished in one duel," said Hydra. "But if you think otherwise, then we'll try to restrain ourselves."

She looked at her father, who hadn't stirred throughout the entire conversation. His eyes had opened into wakefulness halfway through, but he had taken just as much action as if he had still been sleeping.

Katelyn could barely remember the old Orion Malfoy, the fiery, principled and arrogant wizard lord who had been one of the most influential voices in their politics. The man before her now, who relied on the care of his children and the ministrations of house-elfs to so much as cloth and feed himself, was a hollow shell.

Hydra followed her gaze.

"But if an opportunity should arise in these days, or in the days after, for vengeance for our father..." said Hydra in a soft tone, "...Then you'll understand that we'll not apologise for seizing it with both hands. There's more than honour at stake here. There's not just the fate of all wizardry at stake here, for us."

"Then I'll not stop ye," sighed Katelyn. "All I can ask is that ye restrain yourselves for … for what your father fought for. And I shallnae intrude on ye any longer." She turned to leave through the fireplace.

"How's the muggle, by the way?" said Corvus as an afterthought.

"He's fine. I saw the Dementor before it got to him, and I sent it off. He's a bit shaken, I'd imagine, but otherwise unharmed."

Corvus grunted, dismissing the subject and Katelyn. She stepped into the fire, and vanished.

* * *

"You're the educated person in this room, squire of mine," said Cadogan firmly, slapping a piece of parchment onto the table and, with a battered quill pen and ink, scrawling _Plans for the Revengement of Myself on Gaunt_ at the top. "We know who it could be. Katelyn warned us about him, and I saw the way he looked at me at the feast. That creature had a cold purpose behind it, and he's the likely candidate. Now you're going to help me in this. We know he's a threat to myself. We know he could be a threat to all non-wizards. How do we stop him? How do we bring battle to a wizarding lord? Help me plan this."

"This is _not_ how I envisaged spending my Christmas evening," said Trilby.

* * *

The stone tower rose amidst the forest, its ruined tip rising as high as the twisted trees that flanked it.

It was a broch, an ancient tower of stone erected in the days of old by muggles. It rose nearly fifteen metres tall and eight metres in diameter, with metre-thick walls of hewed stone. It had lain in ruins for centuries before the Weasley twins had found it.

Now the roof had been fixed, the holes in the walls had been filled in, and the interior was positively homely. Light spilled out from cracks in the doorframe, and a gentle plume of smoke rose from the top into the night sky, where it was pulled apart by merciless winds.

Amidst the thick growth of vegetation that surrounded it, dripping with snow and slush, a pair of eyes gleamed. They were amber eyes, cold and terrible.

A eagle flew overhead, and swooped down to the ground, next to the watchful eyes. It shifted, and became Nachlan Gaunt.

"Ready?" he asked the eyes.

Skadi stood out of the bushes, tall and upright, a knife and wand in her grasp. She growled in assent. From all around her came the growls of her pack, dozens in number, muted by the howling winds.

"Good," said Gaunt. He turned and looked at the broch, and swept water off his fringe. He raised his wand and , out of the corner of his mouth, muttered, "Storm them. Upon my assault, move your pack in and tear whatever's left of the blood-bastards to pieces."

Skadi growled, the battle-lust upon her. Nachlan drew himself upright, grasped the wand more firmly, and then drew it in a complex, shifting pattern around his head, and it twitched and stirred and began to glow with a dull orange light. Finally, he stopped, and levelled it at the broch, from which the muffled sounds of brotherly laughter could be heard.

"_Fabrico Fiendfyre,_" he snarled.


	15. The Witching Hour

Katelyn Canmore was an early riser, and had never failed in her adult life to catch the dawn as she woke up, even at the height of summer.

Thus, by the mid-morning of the 30th of December, she was wide awake and attending to a deskful of missives and communications, intent upon her work. She was abruptly jolted out of it by a knocking at the door that led up to her office.

She ignored it, at first. If it was someone she knew, and who she trusted to disturb her for good reasons, then they would would know the password and let themselves in.

She signed a paper, sipped from a steaming herbal infusion at her side, and let the knocking continue. On the other hand, if they kept it up for a few minutes, then whatever they wanted to see her about might be worth bothering with. But she really didn't need any distractions at this time. The Great Council would take place in Hogwarts just two days hence. She knew that the various wizard lords would begin trickling in for early accommodation this afternoon, and she would be required to greet every one of them.

The knocking continued.

After a moment it stopped, and from outside came the muffled voice of the muggle knight, Sir Cadogan, saying "Alright, this must be a special wizarding door. Maybe it needs a password."

Then came the grinding voice of the gargoyle at the front of the door. "Ooh, aren't _we_ a thinker."

"You're sentient? Excellent. Is the Headmistress currently inside her office?"

"She is."

"Then could you communicate to her that Sir Cadogan wishes to speak with her? Or let me past?"

"I won't do the second, that's for certain. You haven't got the password, and she hasn't told me you're coming. So you just sit there and grow cobwebs for all I care."

"Look, could you at least tell her that I'm here?"

"I could – but why? Pissing you off has a much greater appeal."

"Oh. I see. You're taking this approach, then?"

"Watching you harumph and pout like a toddler to get what you want might amuse me. Go on. Say please."

"You know, I've really come to loath the Hogwarts gargoyles in the past few weeks."

"We possess a subtle charm that makes up for our capacity for irritation, though. Say pretty please."

"May I remind you that I'm the one capable of movement in this exchange? You're incapable of anything except invective. Petty, uninventive invective at that."

"Did I mention that armour makes you look as bloated as a pig?"

"Why, good sir gargoyle, you appear to have this unpleasant moss growing on your face. Here, let me hammer it off for you ..."

Katelyn quietly said "Macaroons" for mercy's sake, and the door opened inwards, revealing Cadogan poised to clout the gargoyle with a steel-clad fist. He blinked, dropped his arms to his sides, and stepped inside.

"Sir Cadogan," she said smoothly. "I trust the morning finds you well?"

"It does," he said, glancing around the Headmistress's office. He had never seen inside it before, and he was curious to see it.

It was relatively simple and spartan, in spite of Katelyn's rank. A paper-laden desk faced the door, backed by a large glass window. Large, well-furnished, and organised bookcases rose to either side, along which rose metal staircases to allow access to the higher shelves. A couple of chairs and sidetables lurked furtively at the edges, cast into shadow by the faint light from an ever-lit chandelier hanging from the ceiling.

Katelyn coughed.

"I'm afraid I've got a busy day ahead of me, sir knight," she said. "Busy, and filled with paperwork from beginning tae end. Can whitever it is ye've got tae say wait?"

"I'd prefer to say it sooner rather than later."

"Then speak, and come to the point."

"That suits me," said Sir Cadogan, who took a breath and composed himself. "That creature that attacked me the night of Christmas was sent by Gaunt, wasn't it?"

Katelyn blinked. "Yes. Yes, it was. How did ye find that out?"

"Something guided it, whatever it was. There was some will directing it, beyond that of a simple predator. And when I saw Gaunt at the feast, I saw how he reacted to my presence. You'd mentioned earlier how he hated muggles, and that he'd sent some soul-consuming monster to a lord who spoke against him. It wasn't hard to come to a conclusion."

"Well remembered. Then I willnae lie to ye, it was Gaunt. It seems ye've attracted his attention." Katelyn chuckled darkly. "But at least now ye ken he's coming."

"I mean to do more than attract his attention."

Katelyn frowned. "I beg your pardon?"

"Lady Katelyn," and this was the part Cadogan had gone over many times, the part he was relying on, "I humbly request your co-operation and whatever assistance in my endeavour to bring Gaunt to justice, both for the satisfaction of my own honour and for the sake of the damage he could inflict if left unchecked. I beg your leave to pursue him, and to do justice in the name of his victims."

"No," said Katelyn.

Cadogan had expected resistance, but not this quickly or bluntly. "May I ask why not?"

"Because ye are a factor I can ill-afford tae bring intae play at this hour. Because I do not want ye tae attract even more of Gaunt's attention. And because I have my ain plans in progress tae deal with Gaunt."

Cadogan looked stunned. Then his face set and he said "Thinking back to that same conversation, Headmistress, I recall that you said that you would make use of my talents. You said that you desired the assistance that a skilled and unattached muggle could offer."

"That was said before Gaunt knew about ye," snapped Katelyn. "If ye continue tae involve yourself, then ye will assuredly die. I willnae apologise for taking steps tae preserve your life."

"You doubt my ability to face Gaunt, even peripherally?"

"Think back tae what I told ye of Professor Deverill. Think back tae what I told ye of the children." A terrible chilliness covered Katelyn's face like a mask. "This isnae your fight, muggle. Ye cannot conceive of what an opponent ye'll face in Gaunt. Ye cannot imagine the depths tae which he has sunk in pursuit of his mad crusade. Ye will not survive him if ye meet."

Cadogan fell back into silence, his face creased with thought. Then he looked up, his expression calm and steady, and said, "Headmistress Canmore?"

"Aye?"

"That story you told was from your own experience with Gaunt." Cadogan drew up a chair and sat down. "Pray listen to tales from _my_ own experiences."

Katelyn showed scepticism as Cadogan cleared his throat. Then he began, and she settled back in her chair.

"Four years ago," he said, quite calmly, quite pleasantly, "I was in Wales. Trilby was twelve, I believe, on the steps to becoming a man. We were there with a purpose, to confront an evil that lived in the depths of the wooded countryside."

"In a monastery, amidst dark forests, there lived an abbot and his monks. Men of God, in theory devoted to lives of prayer and virtue." Cadogan paused. "In theory, that's the important part. The abbot there, Abbot Aedan, was more a robber baron than anything holy. A brute, a sadist, and a vagabound. He had turned the monastery into a charnel house and place of sin, and the monks were bandits who pillaged and terrorised the countryside for miles around."

"Aedan sent his monks out to satisfy his own pleasures, to loot valuables and to murder and kidnap. He had turned the entire monastery cellar into a place devoted to those kidnapped, with tools for the abbot's pleasure. Racks, knives, thumb-screws, red hot irons, to name but a few. I'll spare you the full details of what I found there."

Cadogan's eyes flashed. "I spoke to villagers who lived nearby. I swore to help. And I stormed the monastery with lance and poleaxe, and not even all the monks with all their weapons and skill could stop me. I found the abbot. I offered him redemption. He laughed in my face, and I fought him and slew amidst his own instruments of torture, and freed those of his captives who were still alive. Some of his monks tried to flee the monastery grounds, and were seen by the peasants. They breed good bowmen in Wales. Not one of them escaped."

Katelyn remained silent. Cadogan fixed her with a level gaze.

"In London, there was a man called Shankadaisy, the self-described ghost of the alleyways. A man with a cheerful manner and a friendly, boyish countenance. He also had a thing for murder. Well, not purely murder. But all of what he did ended with murder. I met him once in my childhood, heard a lot of him in the years inbetween, and met him once more two years ago."

"I hunted him amongst the alleys and across the rooftops. I hunted him in the pouring rain and the dead of night. And I finally found him at his hideout, where he kept his tools and his trophies. He had a lot of knives. Not one of them got past my armour. His blood stained the cobblestones."

Katelyn remained silent, her expression unreadable. Cadogan continued.

"The Mad Marquess, he was another one. He was a _real_ robber baron, despotic and callous and so twisted that the Devil must have needed to create a whole new hell to contain him. He preyed on his own subjects, especially those who caught his attention, and speaking out against him guaranteed a man an agonising death. He so appalled those serving him, he had to keep on sending out for mercenaries from the continent to keep order in his land. He had the money for it, certainly."

"He found a compatriot in Huechler, a Bavarian, and a captain of a contingent of mercenaries. That man delighted in maintaining order, and in inflicting the most horrendous pains on those who spoke out. He also had a whole host of other charming qualities, all of which ensured that he and the Marquess had a very good working relationship. Blood and gold combined."

"The Marquess seemed unassailable to most people. He ruled with an iron fist from his castle. His guardians were strong walls, and strong men to guard them."

Cadogan fixed Katelyn with a look that could have shattered stone.

"_They were not strong enough._"

Katelyn picked at a splinter on her desk, keeping her gaze averted from Sir Cadogan. The knight took a moment to gather his breath.

"These men were all exceptional. Most of those I encounter are nowhere near as villainous. Some of those I fight are zealots, convinced that what they do is utterly within the right. Some do their evil out of desperation. They frantically justify it to themselves, and feel remorse regardless. Very few people are evil, Headmistress. But those who are ..."

"When … when cruelty and greed and ambition grow unchecked, when men find their empathy blunted, when they lose their conscience, when they forget their own humanity … only then do you get evil. But I've seen that often enough, Headmistress, believe me. I've seen it more times than I have ever wanted."

His hand rested on the handle of his poleaxe.

"But every time that I've encountered it, I've fought it. And it hasn't won yet. I know exactly what Gaunt can be capable of. And I will not stand by while he acts."

"Ye think yourself capable of fighting him," said Katelyn grimly. "But were your madmen wizards, sir knight? Could they summon fire, kill with but a word, and bid themselves tae fly? Could they do anything that Gaunt can?"

"They could do more than you think. And magic can be overcome. Anyone can be challenged."

"Hah. Anyone." Katelyn examined the desk surface. "Including me, it seems. Tell me something, sir knight, something that's been irking me. Your religion suffers not witches or magic users tae live, does it not? Dae ye not not consider all of us evil, for practising 'witchcraft'?"

"When you've seen 'witchcraft' levelled as often as I have, against poor old ladies whose only crime is being toothless and wizened and senile and being an easy target for the stupid and frantic, then the charge loses a lot of its power," said Cadogan. "In any case, from what I've seen of you wizards, you seem no more depraved than the rest of us. We're all human, it seems, down to the core."

Katelyn sat and fiddled with a quill, seemingly deep in thought. "How's your squire?" she said casually, keeping the conversation going while she thought things through.

"Trilby? He's doing well. He seems to be getting along famously with your daughter." Sir Cadogan pursed his lips. "Is that something you object to?"

Katelyn waved her hand dismissively. "Katherine's enough of an adult tae make her ain choices. I willnae interfere with them, and neither should ye." She sat upright after another moment, and looked at Sir Cadogan critically.

"I have a plan for dealing with Gaunt in progress that should bear further fruit today. In the event that it should go wrong … and only then … then I'll call upon ye. Ye, and others."

"That's fair. Whatever topples Gaunt shall be satisfactory."

"I'm glad we agree there. Now, if there is nothing else … ?"

* * *

At noon, Katelyn greeted the first of the arriving lords, Bartholomew Greengrass, and his retainers and family.

She exchanged bows and smiles even as she anticipated a surreptitious visit from the Weasley twins, and the arrival of the vital evidence against Gaunt.

The snow continued to fall, in great thick drifts that blotted out the world.

* * *

At four in the afternoon, Katelyn had greeted nearly half-a-dozen lords, and was getting impatient.

Calm down, she told herself. They've got the rest of the afternoon ahead of them to deliver it, and it might be a rough journey up from Hogsmeade. Especially if they've walked to the portkey in the woods near their position.

But worry stole across her mind regardless.

* * *

At seven o'clock, Hughnon Weasley arrived, and she rushed to him at once.

He had heard nothing from them. In his eyes, she saw the same worry that assailed her.

* * *

At ten o'clock, she stood in her office, and downed a third measure of Firewhisky to steady her nerves as she watched the distant lights from Hogsmeade, and worriedly scanned the path up to the castle for a pair of walkers, to no avail.

* * *

At twelve o'clock, the witching hour, she clicked her fingers, and two house-elfs appeared.

"Take word to the Malfoy twins," she said, pointing at one. "Tell them that … that Gaunt has made things more complicated. I require them here at once, to be ready for travel and battle." The creature nodded and vanished with a crack and a flash.

"And as for you," she said, to the remaining house-elf. "Go to the knight. And tell him that Katelyn Canmore requires him to fight evil once more."


	16. A Little Knowledge

Katelyn sat at her desk, her hands folded before her, her expression tight and tense. She stared at the three sitting directly across from her, who returned looks of puzzlement and anticipation.

"The FitzWeasleys havnae contacted me with the information they promised," she said, slowly and carefully. "I fear the worst, that they have been intercepted by Gaunt."

"The FitzWeasleys? You mean the sons of that lord I met at the feast?" said Sir Cadogan. He had answered her summons astonishingly quickly, and had arrived fully armed and armoured. The Malfoy twins, sitting to his side, were openly puzzled by his presence.

"The very same. For your clarification, sir knight, they were the main plan I was referring tae earlier. I had sent them tae spy on Gaunt and his allies, tae chart their acts against wizarding law, tae record their violations of the Masquerade, and tae collate evidence that could be used against Gaunt. I would have revealed that evidence at the Great Council in two days … tomorrow, rather … had everything gone tae plan. But now they havnae delivered it, and I fear for them."

"Then rest assured, Lady Canmore, that we shall verify the condition of the FitzWeasleys," said Hydra smoothly. "We'll depart as soon as possible, and report back to you as soon as possible."

"Well, it's good to feel useful," said Corvus sardonically. "But if I may be so bold, what is the knight doing here? Can he trusted with this sort of information?"

"'The knight' has a name. He'll thank you to use it," said Cadogan quietly yet firmly. Corvus flicked a dismissive look in his direction.

"Sir Cadogan will accompany ye," said Katelyn.

Silence, then shouting.

"Lady Canmore, I really must object ..."

"You _cannot_ be serious. He'll be a millstone around our necks ..."

"There'll be no argument on this," said Katelyn, cutting the objections short. "Ye'll need an additional man at your side if ye encounter opposition. And he has experience that could prove useful."

"He's a muggle. He'll be a liability. I refuse to babysit a man who should never have become involved in all this," snapped Corvus. Hydra didn't talk, but her expression was grim and she nodded in agreement with her brother.

"I can carry my own weight," said Cadogan, still quiet but even more firm. "I can fight. I have experience in ferreting out important details. I have every desire to aid in toppling Gaunt."

"Then keep quiet and out of the way," said Hydra coldly.

"Keep your desires to yourself, and let us perform our rightful role," said Corvus, with even more fervour. "You aren't wanted or needed. You have no talent which will be useful to us, _muggle_."

"Have a care, _wizard_. You're coming dangerously close to insulting my honour."

Corvus glared. "Honour? I wasn't aware muggles knew the word."

"ENOUGH!" roared Katelyn, bringing her wand sharply upon the desk with a clap of thunder and burst of harsh light, shutting up the twins and Cadogan, who started and turned to face the Headmistress. Her face was taught and drawn, her eyes blazing with fury. Her expression could have stopped a rebellious first-year's heart at a hundred paces.

"We dinnae have the luxury of bickering amongst ourselves," she said, drawing each word out slowly and carefully, her voice eerily controlled against the anger in her eyes. "Gaunt has his ain machinations. His ain plans. His ain ideas for the Great Council. He will spring them upon us, and if we dinnae have the evidence from the FitzWeasleys, then everything, _everything_, that we have fought for for two years will be for nothing. Ye will all cooperate, or we will all die at that monster's hands."

She sheathed her wand. Corvus and Cadogan looked at each other with narrowed eyes, and Hydra flicked her gaze between the pair.

After a long moment, Corvus extended a hand towards Cadogan.

"I apologise for calling you a millstone and for slighting your ability," he said, each word sounding as though it was being involuntarily drawn out with a hook.

Cadogan took the hand and shook it.

"I apologise for saying 'wizard' like it was a bad word," he muttered.

"Are ye two done? Good," snapped Katelyn. "Ye'll all go tae the Drunken Chimera, down in Hogsmeade. Ye'll take the Portkey in the back of the inn – Lanigan will show ye where. It'll take ye a few miles south of their hideout in an old broch, and there's a Counterlocation Charm on it, so it'll take ye back as well once you're done. Get tae them, help them if they need help, get what evidence they have, and come back tae me with it. Move quickly and as furtively as ye can. And the luck of the gods go with ye."

They had left her office in silence, and left the school via the main entrance.

Trilby had met Sir Cadogan on the path down to Hogsmeade, just outwith the gates. He was wrapped in his leather cloak against the snow, and held the reins of Cadogan's pony in one hand. The creature nuzzled through the snow at the frozen grass.

"I prepared him like you asked, sir," said Trilby, ignoring the funny looks he received from Hydra and Corvus. "Your axe and shield are packed in the saddlebags, as well as a portion of food, some of the torches, and your flint and tinder."

"Good lad. I'll have need of him." Cadogan took the reins, grasping them as tightly as he could through the gauntlet.

"And for the fourth time, sir, whatever it is you're doing for the Headmistress, then it would be better if I came with you. I mean, I'm meant to come with you. I'm your squire."

"No, I need you to stay," said Cadogan quietly, yet gently. "We might gone for just a few hours, maybe the whole day. There'll be more guests arriving, other wizarding lords. Some could be Gaunt's allies, or Gaunt himself might show up. If we're away, then I need you here to keep an eye on them and report to me when I come back. Tomorrow's going to be … tumultuous, I think."

"Very well, though I dislike it," sighed Trilby. "But do your best to come back in one piece, won't you? One master is bad enough, I can scarcely imagine two or more."

"Cheeky whelp. You're the knight at Hogwarts until I return. Try to keep it and yourself in one piece as well. Keep your weapons close."

Then they had continued down the road, leaving the lights and warmth of Hogwarts behind them. Trilby watched them leave until they were completely hidden amongst darkness and snowfall.

Cadogan wore thick quilted padding under his armour, and had wrapped his cloak around him firmly, but the cold still bit at his bones regardless. Hydra and Corvus, he noted, were wearing thicker robes than usual, as well as tooled leather gloves on their right hands presumably designed to help the wearer keep a firmer grip on their wand.

All of them struggled through the fallen snow, which even on the path was well above knee-height. Hydra had to summon a light from her wand to see by; even the stars were blacked out by the overhanging snowclouds.

They reached Hogsmeade and the Drunken Chimera, and opened the door to find it surprisingly busy. Servants and retainers of the noble houses had had accommodation bought for them in the Hogsmeade inns if they were lucky, and some of them were still awake and nursing drinks in the wee hours of the morning.

Joshua, standing behind the counter polishing a dirty mug with a dirty cloth, looked up as they entered. Corvus gave him a significant nod. The barkeep gestured at a small door at the back of the main room and turned pointedly back to the mug. Joshua knew enough of this particular matter to not get involved. They marched briskly past tables and their slouching occupants, Cadogan gently weaving the pony through the spaces.

They reached the door, opened it, and stepped through into a room barely bigger than a broom closet. A gleaming knife, with leather wrapped around the hilt, rested on the floor.

"Our Portkey," said Hydra simply. "Keep a hold of your beast, knight. And take my hand."

* * *

Blurring, motion, speed, unblurring.

Snow, shadows, clustered pine trees.

Trudging through snow, sweating with exertion despite the cold, eyes fixed on the only point of light in the world.

It was more effort than a simple journey to the broch really demanded. But the snow made every mile a hell of frustration and a slow struggle. Even the two wizards, more resistant to the cold than Cadogan, quickly grew weary.

By the time they saw a thin column of smoke trailing into the sky, that same sky was shot through with dawn's golden fingers.

And by the time they reached the broch, dawn had arrived in force. The overbearing clouds of the night had been driven away briefly, to be replaced with softer layers and waves of white and grey, infused with early-morning light to become rose and golden and iceberg blue. It was a brief moment of beauty amidst a harsh winter.

What waited on the ground, however, had none of the same appeal.

The broch was split open crudely down the middle, a ragged gash from the shattered top to the scorched bottom. Every inch of it was smeared with black soot, turned to sludge by the snow which melted as it fell on it. One side gaped open in a ruin of stones, exposing the gutted and burned contents. Fragments of paper and what might have once been furniture rested here and there, submerged by the sludge.

In the opening, a skeleton lay, facing the open sky. The bones were shattered and scorched with searing heat, and the skull somewhere wore a ghost of the expression of total agony it had had while it still had life. And skin. Another, slightly less scorched skeleton lay nearby, fragments of it sticking out of the snow.

The Weasley bastards hadn't died well. Cadogan stared, appalled by what magic had done.

Hydra looked down at the bodies, while Corvus stalked over to the broch's ruins, his expression taught and twisted with barely controlled anger.

"Dead," he muttered. "Dead, and all their evidence with them. We were too late. Too late." Something incandescent flared across his face, and he spat "Damn Gaunt to all the hells!" He slumped, his hand tight around his wand.

Hydra reached down to lightly brush snow off a blackened skull and suddenly recoiled, hissing in pain.

"What is it?" said Cadogan, and Corvus looked up.

"Hot," she said, startled. "These are still hot." She turned to her brother. "They were killed with Fiendfyre." His face showed shock.

"Fiendfyre?" said Cadogan, looking from twin to twin to skull, baffled.

"It's an exceedingly powerful and dangerous spell, knight," said Hydra. "A spell of cursed fire, capable of burning anything known to wizardkind and muggles alike. Gods. They would have had no defence against it. Look at the fineness of some of the ashes in that tower. It can burn even through stone, when it's directed properly."

"It's hard to summon, and harder to control once it exists," said Corvus. "You'd need to be a wizard of prodigious power and dubious sanity to use it. And how many wizards with those qualities and reason to hurt the FitzWeasleys do we know, sister dearest?" Hydra's mouth twisted in a wry expression.

"Fiendfyre means that we're not late, at that," she said. "This would have happened several days ago, before we could have even known."

"How do you know that?" said Cadogan.

"Had we arrived earlier, these remains would be still hot enough to burn fingers to ash. As it is, they've only given me a blister," said Hydra. She drew one hand across her forehead, inadvertently leaving a line of soot. "Look through the remains. There might be something of use in there."

They set about the task, sifting through the nearby snow and scattered ruins, and in what remained of the broch itself. Stepping inside was like stepping into a furnace, thought Sir Cadogan, a sharp contrast to the weather without. Every step sent him ankle-deep into stony ash, the warmth of which he felt through his greaves.

Corvus cast his gaze around the walls, and noticed a piece of parchment, almost fused with the wall. Some words on it were vaguely intelligible, however, and he squinted to make them out.

… _location of Gaunt's hideout confirmed … crannog on south bank at tip of Loch Morar, ten m. directly north. Few warding and undetection charms in place … esindence instead of manor …_

Corvus stared at the parchment.

"Hydra?" he called. She looked round, came over, and knelt down to look at it as well, summoning light from her wand to make it out better.

The twins looked at it, then at each other.

There was a almost-imperceptible nod between them, one that carried all the meaning it needed to.

They stood up, and looked round at Cadogan, who was shifting through a pile of ash, rummaging at something he thought he felt beneath.

"Knight?" said Hydra. "Continue to search the ruins for anything that may prove useful.. Maybe the FitzWeasleys left physical evidence of some sort that escaped the Fiendfyre. Find it if it exists. We've found another lead. We'll return later."

"What have you found?" said Cadogan, looking away from the ash pile up at the twins. Their faces betrayed a grim satisfaction.

"A chance to settle debts," said Hydra, tearing the parchment loose from the wall and pushing it into a pouch on her belt. "It may prove useful to our cause. We may be gone for most of the day. Attend on us. We _shall_ return."

They stepped out briskly, and Cadogan stared suspiciously after them. They stepped forward through the snow with renewed determination and what looked like eagerness, stepping under the shadow of the trees, and vanishing altogether after a few moments.

They headed north, Cadogan noted.


	17. Blood Eagle

The loch sat amidst snow-shrouded forest, under a pall of mist, smooth and still and silent.

The crannog that protuded from the southern bank also sat silent, though a light could be seen gleaming out from one window.

In the trees, under a Veil Charm, the Malfoy twins watched it, and discussed strategy.

"You assume your Animagus form and circle around," said Corvus to Hydra, in a quiet, urgent tone. "I'll get his attention, and draw him out."

"I'll strike at the best opportunity," nodded Hydra. "Take him by surprise. We have no need to make this an honourable match. He didn't extend father the same courtesy."

"Good. We can explain this to Katelyn later. Are you ready?"

"As I'll ever be. Good luck, brother. Endeavour not to die."

"Little chance of that," said Corvus with a cold smirk. He stepped forward, breaking the Veil Charm, and Hydra moved briskly to the right, transforming as she moved. Flesh and clothing and effects became liquid and shifted, and in an instant a gleaming water snake, banded with green and gold, slithered through the undergrowth.

Corvus broke the tree cover, and stepped onto the snow before the walkway. He breathed in, steadying himself, and checked that his wand was within reach. The only sound for miles around was a distant chirping bird, and his own beating heart.

He saw the water to his right disturbed by ripples that spread out from the bank, and he saw a flash of green and gold beneath the surface.

The door to the crannog, twenty metres distant, swung open suddenly with an audible creak, revealing Gaunt. He stood within the frame with a twisted smile, in heavy dark robes, a wand clasped lightly at his side.

"Corvus," he said, as matter-of-factly as if they'd met at a feast, "I believed you and your sister would arrive sooner rather than later."

Corvus blinked, then slowly drew out his own wand. "You should have expected this coming for a long time, traitor."

Gaunt ignored the insult. He took one deliberate step out of the doorway, and gently closed it behind him. "I take that dear Hydra is in the vicinity? You must have seen my handiwork to the south to have made it here. I should have taken pains to cleanse the tower more thoroughly. I would have preferred to avoid this confrontation."

Corvus's jaw clenched. "Rest assured, traitor, that nothing you could have done would have made me delay this meeting. I'm going to kill you for what you did to our father. And I'm going to hurt you before I do so." The longer he kept Gaunt talking, the more likely that Hydra would find a good place to strike from.

"There's no need for this hostility between us, Corvus. We do not need to fight." Gaunt looked unconcerned as he continued to walk slowly forward. "Your family is noble, of pure blood. You can claim descent from Le Fay herself. We have much in common, more than you'd think. What evil is there in securing the dominion of wizards?" He stopped ten metres away, and extended a gloved hand. "Join me, Corvus. You and Hydra both. We could return the world to proper order together."

"You must think me as vile as you," laughed Corvus. "To hell with your hopes. We're taking revenge for my father. Any other concern is secondary." He took a tighter grip on his wand.

"Your father? Ah." Gaunt shook his head. "Don't you see, Corvus? He stood between me and my rightful rule. He had to removed for the greater good. And I did it without killing him. It's an affront to spill pure blood."

Corvus didn't look awfully convinced by the argument. Gaunt saw the rising fire in his eyes, and how close he was to snapping. He made a guess as to what Hydra was doing at this moment in time. He deduced the Malfoy's opening strategy for this battle. And he knew how to throw a spoke in it.

"I could have spilled his blood, but I didn't," he said. "I left him alive. Although there are some who claim that when your soul's been removed, there isn't much life left in you. Tell me, Corvus, how much help does the senile old fool need? Can he feed himself? Can he cloth himself? Can he so much as shit without help with that husk of a mind I left him?"

Corvus's eyes flared open, and Gaunt knew he had him.

"_Everte Statum!_" bellowed Corvus, his wand flying out and loosing a bolt of magical force at Gaunt before Hydra could get into position, but not before Gaunt had raised a layer of magical defences with a flick of his wand.

The spell caught Gaunt with astonishing force regardless, catching him with a burst of orange-green light and sending him flying back through the air towards the crannog. He impacted with the door with a breath-robbed grunt, crashing through it and into the back of the building. Corvus swept his wand back and over, and hissed "_Confringo._" An orange orb sprang from his wand tip and into the open doorway.

The spell hit a wall, and exploded outwards. The thatch roof flew part with a shout of fire, the wooden walls blew outwards, and the walkway buckled with the force of the detonation, sending burning wood and thatch flying in every direction across the loch surface.

But before Corvus could so much as raise his hand to shield his face from the explosion's force, a shadow flickered in the doorway. Ahead of the wall of fire that billowed out of the crannog's ruptured sides and door, a eagle outflew the fire. It was crimson-coloured, and its eyes gleamed with a cruel light. It let out a harsh, terrible cry as, buffeted by the force and heat of the fire, it hurtled towards Corvus.

Corvus hissed, and as Gaunt's eagle-form sped towards him with claws outspread, he dived forward and blurred into his crow-shape. He sped through the air towards Gaunt, dove under the slashing beak and claws, stabbed out with his beak, and sliced free a pair of red feathers. He dropped them and sped off with a mocking caw.

The eagle screeched as it turned mid-air, and flew straight up at the circling crow. The two wizard dove at each other, meeting with furious cackles and clouds of flying bloodied feathers. They twisted and slashed at each other in the air, stabbing with their beaks and swiping out with their claws and buffeting the air with their wings. Corvus writhed and turned in the air to desperately avoid Gaunt's vastly greater strength and natural weaponry. Gaunt screeched as he tore out and out again at the dodging crow.

After a few furious moments, Corvus peeled suddenly away from the combat and dove like an arrow straight back to solid land. Gaunt dove right after him, flattening his wings against his sides and opening his beak ready to snatch the crow out of the air. He had mass and momentum and strength going for him. Corvus struggled to stay ahead.

Finally he shifted mid-air, and tumbled back to the walkway, landing on all fours. Gaunt swept and slashed across his back, slashing free a strip of flesh. Corvus fell and cursed with pain. Gaunt hurtled on, and shifted back to humanity in mid-dive, landing onto a frosted tree stump.

Corvus picked himself up, and Gaunt turned to face him, perched atop the stump, levelling his wand at Corvus's face. The two wizards stared each down, poised to begin battle anew, their eyes burning with the ferocity of fighting dogs.

Then they sprang forwards at the same moment, wands blazing, and curse clashed against hex clashed against curse with with sound of clashing daggers and the light of flashing fireworks. Spell effects glanced off shields or flew to the sides and put paid to the serenity of the lochside. Snow flew up in blazing arcs of red-hot spray, trees detonated under the impact of curses, and fire flew in flapping gouts into the sky like arterial spray from a wound. Gaunt pressed forwards, his wand hand blurring, and Corvus gritted his teeth and fought to withstand the raw kinetic force of Gaunt's magic.

Then Hydra sprang up from the loch with an eruption of water and a cry of "_Avada Kedavra!_" and all hell broke loose.

* * *

Sir Cadogan breathed out with satisfaction as he finally heaved out what he had felt beneath the ash, and dragged it out with a small explosion of black dust.

It was a small chest made from oak and reinforced with iron bands, and light played across its surface in unnatural ways that hinted at the magic binding it. Cadogan smiled a grim smile. He had had to spend hours shifting god-knew how much ash before he had uncovered it, but he was sure that it was what he was looking for.

Evidence, especially of the sort needed to bring down a wizarding lord, had to be of physical quantity. Eyewitnesses and personal accounts wouldn't be enough, especially in a society where memory and matter could be altered beyond recognition. This chest had to contain the hard evidence, such as it existed for wizards. Documents, spell ingredient samples, whatever. Cadogan wasn't sure what.

It only made sense to keep such vital information in the strongest refuge you had while you worked on it. And it only made sense to reinforce and hide it, in case you were attacked by your enemies.

Cadogan's line of thought, aided by past discussions with Trilby, had proven correct.

Now he only had to get this to the Malfoy twins.

He stepped out into the snow, where it was being refreshed by yet another fall. Overhead, clouds rumbled and rolled, huge expanses of darkness that seemed heavier than the ones that had come before. A snowstorm of massive proportions looked imminent.

He stared to the north. They had left with barely any warning, even less explanation, and hadn't stayed to find what could be useful to the Headmistress. They were following their own agenda, that much was plain. But what, and exactly where?

The clouds rumbled. Cadogan looked up. They had left hours before, and the day was getting darker.

He had to get this evidence to them, so that they could leave together.

He checked the sky again.

"Blast it, they've had too long already," he said, stepping forward and reaching for his pony, cradling the chest under one arm. "Come on, boy. We're going north."

* * *

Gaunt sidestepped the green light that sliced through the air and struck home against a tree branch, blasting it apart in a cloud of fiery splinters. He slashed a broad stroke with his wand at Hydra, snapping "_Incendio,_" the syllables falling from his mouth with the rapidity of a hailstorm, and sending a broad sweep of fire at her across the length of the arc. She dived beneath it, barely clipping the top of her head against the flame.

"_Protego,_" Gaunt said quickly, turning on his heel quickly and summoning a gleaming shield of magical force between himself and Corvus. It sprang just in time to catch a Detonation Curse from Corvus, which exploded in blazing gossamer lines of force across it.

Gaunt then smiled a crooked smile and did something he was reasonably sure no one had done before.

"_Progredi,_" he said, tapping the Shield Charm with his wand. The shimmering wall of magical energy suddenly hurtled forward towards Corvus.

"_Reducto!_" yelled Corvus, sending a slashing line of blue lightning at the oncoming shield, which glanced off and impacted the water with a flash of steam. "_Mansariun! Annihlus!_" These had largely the same effect, and ended in largely the same manner. The Shield Charm rushed on, and impacted into Corvus like a battering ram, pushing him along into the remains of the shattered crannog. Corvus smacked into the remains of a wall with a sharp cracking sound and a gasp of pain, and he rolled helplessly to one side as the Shield Charm ploughed on, ripping the remains of the crannog off its platform and into the churning loch. He clung to the splintered walkway, wheezing for breath.

Hydra slashed again at Gaunt with a line of purple fire that raked across the hem of his robes, thanks only to a hasty backstep that saved his feet from being hewed off at the ankles. He snarled with sudden anger and yelled "_Serpensortia!_" A snake leapt from his wand, as black as polished ebony and mad as all hell, drawing a curse from Hydra as she turned her attention to deal with it.

It kept her occupied just long enough for Gaunt to turn back to Corvus and spit "_Incisembrum!_" as Corvus rose unsteadily to his feet, his wand arm outstretched.

The spell caught his arm just below the elbow, and took his forearm clean off. It landed in the water, amidst a blooming cloud of blood. Corvus swayed, his face pale, his mouth opening and shutting, forming no sounds.

Gaunt said "_Stupefy,_" almost casually, and a jet of red light hammered into Corvus, knocking him to the end of the walkway where he lay still and mute.

There was a shriek from Hydra, an animal sound of raw fury, and Gaunt barely turned in time to meet her assault. She tore at him and ripped at his defences like a wolf, her eyes gleaming red, her wand crackling with magic. Gaunt hastily retreated backwards, yielding ground as she pressed him in a non-verbal onslaught of blazing fire and light.

He found his defence overwhelmed. He dodged one curse, raised a hasty Shield Charm that was shattered by the next curse, and sidestepped and leapt away from the next in succession with growing alarm.

He changed tactics. He ducked a Killing Curse, then gasped "_Iteagavosa!_", sending him flying up into the air. It was a more cumbersome, less comfortable way of flying than in an Animagus form, but it would be necessary for what he planned.

Hydra snarled and sent another curse blazing through the air at Gaunt, which he dodged. She swept her wand around and began "_Iteaga..._"

"_Expelliarmus,_" Gaunt finished before her, and her wand swept out from between her fingers while she was halfway through her spell. She blinked, startled, and Gaunt cast the last spell of the duel.

"_Bombarda._"

The spell struck down, and exploded with a thunderous retort against the right side of Hydra's head. She was blasted down into the ground, struck senseless and unconscious, and collapsed with a gasp.

Gaunt hung in the air, catching his breath, and looking down at the destruction.

His crannog was a flaming ruin, what little of it was left. The forest nearby was in pieces. The loch was a churning mess of burning wood and thatch. Hydra's and Corvus's bodies lay slumped and still …

… But not dead. The weak fluttering in their chests, and a painfully faint breathing, attested to that.

For a moment, he considered finishing them off while they were helpless. But he decided against it. One conviction he held to was that pure blood must not be shed, and the Malfoys were nearly as pure as you could get. If they were to die, it couldn't be directly by his hand. Exposure or blood loss should be sufficient.

Besides, killing them now would have been merciful. And Gaunt was not inclined to be merciful. He knew that Skadi and her pack were in the vicinity.

He Apparated away without a backwards glance.

The first peal of thunder from the overhanging clouds rolled across the sky. Sleet began to fall.


	18. Fire and Fleet and Candlelight

Sir Cadogan stamped through a tangle of frosted thorns, walked around a boulder, frowned at a split-open tree, and looked directly ahead at the loch's bank and said "Oh, bugger."

The gleam of the full moon above him cast the entire area in an eerie silver light, and spared no detail. Something that might have once been a crannog, in the same way that a mess of burnt bacon might have once been a happy piglet, protruded from the bank. The water was a dark stew of ash and drifting matchwood. The trees and ground around him was a seared mess. And two familiar bodies lay amidst it all.

He quickly tied the pony's reins around a tree branch and ran to the first of the figures. Hydra Malfoy lay within a furrow of mud and churned snow and blood. One side of her face was a mess of blood and flayed skin, and her right eye was sealed over with a clot of dried blood. She stirred weakly as Cadogan drew near.

"Kcch," she said in a voice barely louder than a mouse's squeak, one hand twitching and unclenching. Her one good eye, made bloodshot and bleary, looked up at the armoured knight.

"Hold still," he said, not ungently. "Don't move, in case you damage anything. I'm just going to check on your brother after I tend to that wound." He hurriedly took of his cloak, and used the gleaming edge of his poleaxe to slice off a long strip from the edge, which he dipped into the lochwater and wound gently around her head. He dared not bandage her head too tightly, for fear he might disturb pieces of what might be a broken skull. He applied just enough pressure to control the bleeding, and dared apply no more.

He finished with the impromptu tourniquet, and went to check on Corvus on the broken walkway. The wizard had woken up earlier, as evidenced by the cloak wound around what had to be the stump of an arm. He had tried to claw his way along the walkway to get to his sister, but had collapsed in unconsciousness halfway through. He lay still, and Cadogan had to check for a pulse to determine whether he was alive or dead. He was alive, but only just.

"Bloody wizards and bloody incompetency at basic battlefield medicine," muttered Cadogan, kneeling down and examining the cloak around the stump. The cloak had been turned from dark green to dark red (inasmuch as colours could be discerned under the moonlight), and he was reluctant to remove it for fear of opening the wound again. He sighed and slashed off another strip from his cloak, and bound it tightly around the arm, just above the elbow. In the short term, this would stop the bleeding. In the long term, the limb remains could become necrotic. But he hoped he wouldn't have to keep it there for long.

Okay, they were stabilised at least, sort of. But there was too much blood on the snow and on the walkway, and the pair were dangerously pale. If they didn't get to whatever passed for a wizarding doctor soon, then they would certainly die.

And since neither of them looked capable of consciousness, let alone use whatever vanishing trick it was that wizards used to travel long distances, then it looked as though he'd be arranging transportation.

He looked round at the pony. The beast whickered with unhappy anticipation. It was a sturdy breed, with a well-deserved reputation for stamina, but trekking for ten miles through heavy snow had tired it, and doing the same thing again with two people on its back could collapse it altogether.

But what other choice did he have?

"If it's any consolation," Cadogan muttered to the pony, as he gently picked up Hydra, trying not to disturb her head, and setting her upright in the saddle, "This'll be the last insane thing I ask of you for a while." He secured her with strips of twine around the ankles and hands, attached to the pony's bridle. He then went to Corvus, and repeated the process, securing him in front of his sister in the saddle. He stood back warily, ready to catch them should they keel to one side, and was satisfied when they didn't. He suddenly remembered something, and collected their wands where they lay fallen, stuffing them into frozen fists.

He took a torch out from a saddlebag, from the bag next to one containing the chest of evidence, and fumbled for flint and steel with numb fingers, coaxing a spark from the metal and setting the torch ablaze. It was the only point of warm light for many miles, but it was enough. It would have to be. He held it up with one hand, warding off the night.

He took the grumbling pony by the rein and led it off back into the trees. Hydra and Corvus clung to life atop the pony's back. Cadogan aimed for the south, back for the Portkey.

"Damn everything," he muttered uncharitably. "Damn these idiots for rushing off. Damn this poxetten winter. Damn Gaunt for existing. What the hell happened there?"

The pony wheezed by means of response. The full moon beat down, past the tree cover and past the clouds covering the world with sleet.

The forest's heart opened up, a primeval and ancient region in an ancient location. The pine trees were thick and clustered and shrouded with impenetrable shadows, which also concealed roots and rocks at ground level which made any sort of walking a treacherous proposition at the best of times. And the dead of night amidst a constant downpour of sleet was so far from ideal as to be ludicrous.

At least the nice full moon overhead allowed for some light in addition to the torch, light which trickled down from patches between the branches.

Cadogan walked and sweated in the cold for what seemed like mile after mile, constantly guiding the wheezing pony and its deathly pale cargo. Neither of the twins made any noise, apart from the occasional protesting grunt when low hanging branches swiped across their face.

He was dead on his feet when the trees began to thin out, and when the forest changed. They emerged from the thick and oppressive woods into a different region, where the trees grew far apart and flung their branches far and high. Wide open spaces, frosted over with ice and snow, ran between each great trunk, covered in darkness from the overhanging branches. Streams of silver moonlight filtered down from gaps in the canopy, illuminating a few small patches of ground while keeping the bulk of the area in shadow.

Cadogan walked until a voice rasped out from the shadows.

"Knight. Walk no further."

He instantly stopped, making the pony start with the sudden halt and sending Corvus and Hydra asway. He thrust the torch out, and amidst the darkness, he saw a glint of gleaming teeth and burning eyes.

A figure stood between the trees, covered from head to toe in a bulky hooded cloak that covered every part of its body. Its voice was familiar to Sir Cadogan, a raspy rattle touched with something foreign. Where had he heard it before?

"Reveal yourself," he growled, dropping the pony's reins and reaching for his poleaxe. The beast whinnied with fear, a high-pitched sound that Cadogan ignored. "_Reveal yourself!_" He drew out the poleaxe, and its edge gleamed in the darkness.

The figure laughed, a dry, mocking laugh, and drew its hood back a little further. The orange light of the torch revealed the figure's identity. A sharp, scarred face smiled a wintry smile, with pointed yellow teeth and with what looked like dried blood smeared around the lips.

Skadi Ulfsdottor said "Here your journey ends, knight. Here under the hunter's moon."

Cadogan stared. "You were at the Christmas feast with Gaunt," he said. "If you serve that man, then I will give this chance only once. Stand aside."

"_You_ think to threaten _me_?" sneered Skadi, the moonlight gleaming on her teeth. "Such bravado. Such typicality. You're an amusing creature. I will give you this chance in return. Give me your charges, and we will let you leave unharmed for one night."

"I will burn before handing them to you," said Cadogan firmly. "And who is 'we', madam?"

Skadi rose her head and howled to the tree tops, a dark ululation that seemed to go on forever. No sooner had it ended, then it was answered by other howls across the forest. Most of them were distressingly near at hand. All of them sounded eager and blood-hungry.

"What are you?" said Cadogan. He shifted into a combat-ready stance, kneeling down to jam the torch upright into the frozen earth, and drew the shield from behind his back.

"A warg," said Skadi. "A shapeshifter. A skinwalker. A descendent of Holy Fenris. The champion of the old gods of blood and bone. And for my part, I know exactly what you are, knight."

Cadogan looked around. He could hear oncoming steps across the ground, the sound of dozens of paws striking the frozen ground in a rhythm that matched his beating heart.

"We know all about knights in my realm," said Skadi. She took a step closer. "They came with their priests from the sun-kissed lands, spreading lies and weakness that ate at the old ways like a canker. Your weakling god drove out the old gods, and supplanted his bastards and demons in their place. They are gone from muggle memory. But not from _ours._"

She threw one arm wide as she spat the last word, as a great flash of lightning ripped across the sky, stabbing light even through the thick leaves and branches. And all around Cadogan and the pony and the twins, there were wolves. They surrounded the rim of the depression in the ground that Cadogan found himself in, staring down with blood-red, unnaturally intelligent eyes and slavering jaws, waiting in their dozens.

"I've seen knights _dissected_," said Skadi, her eyes gleaming with fire. "I've bloodied my teeth and claws in the flesh of hundreds of your kind. Once again, I give you this offer. Run, and leave your wounded. They are what concerns my employer. You are irrelevant. Leave them, and save yourself."

Cadogan held his shield before him, and raised his poleaxe, aiming the point out like a spear. "You'll go through me first before you take them."

Skadi regarded him with an unreadable expression. Then she waved one hand in a lazy fashion.

"The knight, at least, does not lack for courage. Pack, _go through him_."

There was an ear-splitting howl from all sides, and then wolves thundered forward.

Cadogan whirled to meet the first one with a thunderous swipe from the poleaxe, hammering into its neck and sending it flying backwards with a gurgled yelp. He pivoted and thrust out with the head, meeting another wolf's charge head on and sending the spear head deep into its chest. It squealed and struggled off with a gush of blood, and Cadogan followed up the strike with an overhead blow, moving faster than chain lightning as he buried the axe into the wolf's back.

Something flew in from his side, and he raised his shield just in time to catch a wolf which leapt in at head height. It snarled and slavered and scrabbled at the shield's edges, and he threw it bodily at another incoming wolf, sending the two beasts crashing to the ground in a mad tangle of yelping and trashing limbs.

There was an abrupt crunch and burst of screaming pain from his right calve, and he yelled as he turned (painfully) to smash away another wolf, which had leapt in from behind Sir Cadogan and snapped down on his armoured leg. The metal had been buckled, and the flesh beneath agonisingly twisted. The wolf was sent spinning from a blow from the butt of the poleaxe, but it had drawn blood.

The area around Sir Cadogan broiled with snarling, circling wolves, pacing around him with easy lopes and fighting as a pack. A few would dash in to strike at him, and the instant they were dispatched or sent yelping, another grey blur would streak in to rip at the knight. He stood alone, a silver pillar amongst a churning grey sea, his poleaxe constantly blurring and striking out and shedding blood and fur with every blow.

The only mercy was that the pack was following Skadi's directive. Neither the terrified, frozen pony or the twins had been hurt, while Cadogan was still fighting and offering amusement. A pair of wolves circled them, snarling and penning them in, but that was all.

He slashed out desperately with his poleaxe for what felt like the hundredth time, with muscles that burned and ached as if on fire, and started when he saw that the wolf he lashed out at was the first one he had fought. It was still very much alive and fighting, and Cadogan latest blow only sent it howling away before it dived back into the circle of wolves.

"Die, damn you to hell!" he screamed with frustration, his poleaxe weaving a hurricane of steel and flying blood in the air.

Skadi, still standing between the same two trees, not having moved once during the entire battle, laughed again.

"You are doomed to die, knight," she called. "You have nothing that can hurt us. Only silver can wound a werewolf. Only spell can harm a werewolf. Only fire can kill a werewolf. And you have none of these, muggle knight. You're going to die. Slowly."

Cadogan looked around or the still upright torch, his only hope. On cue, a wolf barged it over with their body, sending it guttering into the deep frost. The area was plunged into darkness, and then the wolves struck.

One bounded in at head height, and was blindly struck out of the air by Cadogan's flailing poleaxe. Another, while the knight's weapon was occupied, leapt in and nipped at his right ankle, severing something vital and sending him to one knee on the ground with a scream. Another wolf, slicing through the air, tore away his shield and send it clattering to the ground. Another one charged at his front and bowled him over, sending him rolling across the ground until he collided with a tree, winding him and sending a sharp pain shooting across his back.

Choking for breath, he dug his finger tips into the bark and wrenched his way upwards. His leg threatened to give way beneath him, and he gasped as he stood with his back to the tree and held his poleaxe before him.

Skadi had walked closer, and stood amidst her back. A cluster of cold flames danced in the palm of her hand, the only source of light apart from that permitted by the trees. She smiled a cruel, insidious smile.

"Will you say some last words, knight?" she sneered. "Something befitting your breed?"

Some, in this situation, would have begged and sobbed and pleaded for their lives. Some would have muttered something sardonic as death reached out for them. Some would have stood with jaw outthrust and weapon brandished at the night, and uttered something heroic worthy of history books.

Sir Cadogan, however, grasped his poleaxe with both hands, steadied himself, and bellowed "RAAAAARGH!" as he charged, axe blazing into the massed wolves, who surged against him in a storm of teeth and slashing claws and rank flesh.

Skadi coolly drew her head back, doused the cold flames with one shake of her palm, and stared directly into one of the patches of permitted moonlight.

Silver beams cut across her face. Her face twisted with amusement. And then changed.

Limbs shorted and sprouted fur. Her teeth lengthened and gleamed. Her face elongated and warped. Her body realigned itself.

Cadogan suddenly found a path clear of wolves between himself and the monster before him. Skadi had become a great she-wolf, massive and muscled and as white as snow beneath the dim moonlight, as high as a pony at the shoulders. She was a thing of winter, rippling with corded muscle beneath her white hide, eyes burning with amber fire, teeth shining like daggers hewn from flint.

She was a thing of nightmares, a dark hearkening from humanity's past that send cold shivers down the spine of all prey.

Cadogan stood stock still, his axe upheld and dripping, and waited for her to move.

She took one leisurely step forwards, crunching across the frost, a low growl coming from her that was echoed by every other werewolf there.

Cadogan braced himself for the end.

And then there was the gentlest of coughs from one side, and a weak, soft voice said "_Pyrovate._"

Everyone turned to where it had originated, to the twins atop the pony. Hydra sat with her wand pointed at Cadogan's poleaxe, her eyes sleepy and fevered, her voice holding a deadly measure of strength despite her injuries.

There was darkness. And then there was light, as a great tongue of fire sprang from the wand tip and touched the poleaxe's head, sheathing it suddenly with a coat of billowing fire. Cadogan gaped at his weapon, feeling the intensity of the heat that peeled off it in waves.

Then he turned to Skadi, and said, "You mentioned fire, madam?"

She snarled and sprang forward at him along with several other wolves. Other wolves turned, growling, to the pony.

Corvus, unseen, twitched his wand with his only hand and whispered "_Accio Portkey._"

Cadogan stood his ground and spun his poleaxe deftly, shearing through the necks of two incoming wolves with the searing flames, and followed the axe arc to slash open the skull of another. The flames roared their approval, and Cadogan bulled forward, fire heralding his passage and being shed in his wake. Wolves yelped and hissed and leapt from his path, running from the weapon of fire.

Skadi growled and _leapt_, cutting through the air like a demon hurled out of hell, teeth bared and aimed for Cadogan's throat. He sprang back, but not far enough, and she collided into him, a snarling thing of utter strength and unbridled rage, teeth locking around his helmet.

His hand scrabbled blindly to one side, and found his fallen shield. He seized it tight, and brought it around and hammered it into Skadi, smacking her off him and and sending her rolling to one side.

Springing upright, he glanced around and saw something glinting far away between the distant trees, moving closer rapidly.

It looked rather like the dagger that had taken them here, headed towards Corvus's outstretched hand.

He turned back to the pony and the mounted twins. All that stood between him and them was Skadi.

She rose and, making no sound, lashed out once more, teeth blazing like daggers, aimed at Cadogan's throat. She seized at his greathelm and bit in tightly, piercing the metal and Cadogan's cheeks. With a desperate grunt of effort, he rammed his shield between his chest and her and shoved with all his might.

She was pushed back, just long enough for Cadogan to get in one great swipe with his poleaxe.

It shed flames as it flew through the air, and sliced cleanly through her neck.

Her white head flew through the air, locked in its last snarl, shedding no blood through the cauterised wound.

Sir Cadogan barged past her flopping body, and ran full tilt at the pony, before the dagger reached Corvus's hands and left Cadogan stranded. The pony charged at the same time, trampling one werewolf beneath its steel-shod hooves as it darted straight for its master.

He seized the reins at the exact moment that the dagger hilt slapped into Corvus's open palm.

And the snarls from the wolves were replaced with the sound of rushing wind, and the darkness became a blur that streamed before Cadogan's eyes.

* * *

The door in the back of the Drunken Chimera flew open, and Cadogan flopped out onto the floor. Behind him, an exhausted pony stood and wheezed, atop which were sat the bloodied Malfoy twins.

It wasn't a typical sight for the late-night regulars of the Drunken Chimera, that was certain.

"Healers," gasped Cadogan, as people surged up from their tables with voices raised in concern and shock. "Twins hurt. Badly. Need doctors. Arab doctors, for preference."

From a distance, he heard Joshua shout "Get them to the castle's infirmary. Anyone who's a Healer, go with them and stabilise them. Where's my broom?"

_Broom?_, though Cadogan, before adrenaline subsided, and his injured body fell forward into a deep sleep.


	19. Pinioned

Wakefulness for Sir Cadogan came suddenly, when a cloud in the snowy sky shifted a vital degree and directed a lance of sunshine down at his face through the cottage's windows.

He groaned and stirred, pulling away the blankets and shifting himself upright. This was harder than he expected, as his right leg was numb and slow to respond. That was odd, he thought. He thought with bleary cogitation, trying to remember why his leg was numb.

Then it hit him, a memory undammed by the first stirrings of his fatigued mind. Snow, fighting, werewolves, Malfoys, fire.

He half-sank back into the bed with a groan. He felt around for a drink of water from the small stone cup that usually lay by his bedside. It was pressed into his hand as he fumbled, by a smaller, warmer hand. He squinted round to see Locke the house-elf peering at him with disconcertingly luminous eyes.

"My thanks," Cadogan said, taking the cup and sipping from it slowly. The ice-cold water spread down into his body like veins of shocking coldness, making him cough.

"Careful, master, careful," squeaked Locke. "Mustn't have any accidents or choking, not when you're ailing as it is."

"Ailing, right," muttered Cadogan. He cautiously felt one hand down his right leg, and felt several ropey scars where his armour had seized at his flesh. He felt further, and felt a similar scar on his ankle. He drew his hand to his back, where he was sure a rib had broken in the battle yesterday, and was pleased to feel no pain when he rubbed at it, which would have been a sign of a fracture.

Impressive. If they could heal wounds so quickly and mend rib fractures in the space of one night, then clearly even Arab doctors could be taught a thing or two by wizard doctors. He sipped at the water more eagerly, the coldness of the water waking him.

"They brought you here last night, after you arrived back with the Malfoy masters," said Locke while Cadogan drank. "The Malfoys were taken up to the infirmary in Hogwarts itself, to get attended to by the school Healer. They treated you here to devote the infirmary entirely to the Malfoys, and one of the Healers attached to the Weasleys tended to you here."

"And the Malfoys? Are they alive?"

"They are, master, though very badly hurt. They're being visited by your squire at the moment, along with the Headmistress's daughter. Shall I go and tell your squire that you have woken up, master?"

"I … no. I'll go to him and visit them," said Cadogan. "Just as soon as I'm dressed." He swung his legs out of bed and stood up, putting an incautious amount of weight on his right. He lurched and fell with a curse.

"The master's leg might be numb for a little while," said Locke, helping Cadogan up. "The Healer who attended you saw that you had been bitten by a werewolf in several places on your leg and on your face. The bites were small and recent, so he was able to apply a restorative that expunged the infection of lycanthropy from those areas, before it could take a hold in you."

"Very thoughtful of him," said Cadogan. "Where's my armour?"

"Locke will fetch it. But you must eat a full breakfast before you go to the infirmary, and drink plenty of water. The Healer left instructions." Locke vanished.

Cadogan finished the water and went through his morning ritual, as he brushed his teeth with soot and salt and quickly washed himself with magically-heated water from the central room, using a long-handled brush and pumice stone. He looked out the window as he washed, trying to gauge the time. The position of the glow behind the shifting clouds suggested it was midday. He must have been out cold for hours.

He wandered back through to find his armour on the stand, and his weapons lying nearby. The armour had been scrubbed until it shone, and the dents and rents left from yesterday had been hammered out or patched. His cloak was draped behind it, repaired with a vivid red cloth that clashed with the original, long-faded colour. His poleaxe rested nearby. The house-elfs had polished it as best they could, but the pitted head retained a patina of scorching, and the wooden shaft darkened along the shaft near to the head.

He dressed, and by the time he had finished, Locke reappeared with a plate of bread and cold meat and fruit, with a pitcher of cold water resting next to it. Cadogan sat down and reached for a piece of bread, suddenly aware of how hungry he was.

"Say what you will about yesterday, at least it was productive," he said absently as he put a slice of beef across the bread. Locke looked at him impassively.

"Look at what happened," said Cadogan. "We discovered what happened to the FitzWeasleys. The twins fought Gaunt, and I'd guess they put up a hell of a fight. I found the evidence of Gaunt's treachery and madness, rescued the twins, and fought a pack of werewolves. That's what I call productive."

"Evidence?" enquired Locke.

"Yes, the evidence I got from the FitzWeasley's tower," said Sir Cadogan, frowning with the bread and beef raised halfway to his mouth. "I take it that it was delivered to Headmistress Canmore?"

Locke shook his head. "Nothing was delivered to the Headmistress. The twins were delivered straight to the infirmary. You were delivered here, master. Nothing was picked up or delivered from you, Locke is certain."

"What? Are you sure? It was in my pony's saddlebags." Sir Cadogan grew perturbed. "Did nobody think to search them?"

"Sorry, master. Wizards do not use horses by custom, they wouldn't know that the saddlebags would hold things of importance."

"I … What day is the Great Council for the wizards?" said Cadogan, pieces clicking together in his brain with a growing sense of panic.

"Why, today, master. Headmistress Canmore should at this moment be … master? Master, why are you getting up? You haven't eaten your breakfast! _Master, get back here and follow the Healer's orders!_"

Cadogan didn't bother look behind or listen on his way out, stopping only to seize his poleaxe and shove it through his belt before he ran out into the snow.

* * *

The Great Hall of Hogwarts churned with a sea of wizardry, a pulsing maelstrom of arguments and declarations and sparks and fluttering banners.

Over two hundred noble families of wizards were represented in that hall, with more than four hundred wizard lords and ladies and offspring and as many menials and half-blood servants assembled, and more had yet to arrive. They had coagulated into two camps on either side of the hall, the left for the Masquerade, the right for Gaunt. Invective and threats spiralled across the air, as the two sides argued and shouted over the heads of the ditherers and undecided.

They were drawn from all corners of the British Isles. The muggle nations and divisions of the Kingdoms of Scotland and England, the English-ruled Principalities of Wales, the Lordship of Ireland, and the Norwegian holds on Orkney and Shetland had no meaning; all British wizards saw Hogwarts as the true seat of power, and they were well-represented. Witches in heavy and formal European robes, introduced by the Norman incursion, rubbed shoulders with wizards defiantly holding to the old Druidic styles of white robes and rough staves and tin torcs. Tattooed and woad-streaked witches clustered with wizards who wore clothing befitting muggles lords and kings. The clash of styles and customs and histories and opinions in that one room could have set the world ablaze with argument, and the wizards were certainly giving it their best shot.

More ostentatious that even the wizards, however, were their banners. Each family brought with them their house's embroidered heraldry to add a medley of colour to the chaos. Pictures of animals and objects sewn into the banners would move as appropriate, adding their own caws and barks and hisses to the affray. The Greengrasses stood proudly near the room's centre shouting their approval for Gaunt, servants holding up their banner, a twisting black ribbon bearing a yellow-and-green strip that from one perspective could have been a sword, and from another a blade of grass. The Weasleys stood far to the left, nearly a dozen of them under the brooding Hughnon, who had his two trueborn children holding up the Weasley's russet stoat within a ring of holly on a pale gold field. The Canmores stood near the end of the Hall, just next to the left of the podium, using several Levitation Charms to hold up their own silver griffon rampant on a blue field. Katelyn herself sat upon the throne-like chair at the room's end, in robes of deepest blue, under the great crest of Hogwarts, quartered with an eagle, badger, serpent, and lion on different-coloured fields.

Katelyn's face was tight and drawn as she scanned the sea of wizards. The Malfoys were conspicuous by their absence. Her own division looked slightly smaller than Gaunt's. Many of the undecided had noticed this as well, and seemed to be drifting towards the superior side.

And worst of all, she had none of the evidence. The Malfoys twins had returned with the knight, all of them injured, and all she heard from Hydra when she had briefly gained consciousness in the small hours of the morning was that the FitzWeasleys were dead, and, just to add an extra patina of horribleness, that Gaunt had werewolves under his command.

And now Gaunt would have his say before all these wizards, and she would have nothing which to confront him, and if she tried, there would be rivers of blood flowing out of the hall's doors. But if she didn't, those rivers would flow across Britain. Either way, one mad wizard would have won. Either way, she had lost.

For all the light before her, nothing had ever seemed so dark.

She stared right ahead, watching the thinning trickle of wizards that came through the open doors, bound to begin the Great Council once they had all arrived.

There was a swish of green and black robes from the doorway, and then Gaunt entered.

He walked forward with a terrible confidence and surety, his eyes running over his supporters to his right, his hands clasped behind his back, his mouth set in a lazy, twisted smile. Behind him fluttered the banner of House Gaunt. It was huge, strung between two wooden poles that were, in the most traditional of wizarding ways, borne by the reanimated bodies of his predecessors. Gaunt's father and older brother trudged forward, the dead light of Inferi swimming in their dull eyes, grasping the banner of their house and holding it high. It was a field of green, on which was set a stylised Wand of Merlin, entwined with two white snakes forming a double helix around the wand. The snakes hissed on the cloth, the inset rubies that were their eyes glimmering.

The wizards parted for Gaunt, whether out of fear or respect.

With all the attention on him, nobody noticed the shadowed figures who peeled off to either side in the entrance hall and vanished up the staircases.

The room hushed as he entered, and he cleared his throat once he was the centre of attention.

"My apologies for my lateness," he said to Katelyn mildly, "I was detained unavoidably. However, I believe that I'm the last lord that needs to arrive. We should start the council, before any more of the company's valuable time is wasted."

Katelyn couldn't hide the coldness in her look at Gaunt. She didn't even try to hide it. After a moment, she sat back in her throne and began, in a flat tone, the words required of her for the called council.

"We call this Great Council of Wizardry to order on this, the first of January of the year 1293, by the collective wish of a score of lords. All the lords and ladies of wizardry have arrived, and all have been recognised."

"As this council has been invoked, the right to speak first is granted to the calling lord rather than the Headmistress of Hogwarts, so that they may freely raise the matter which they wish to discuss."

"I grant the floor to Nachlan Gaunt, Lord of House Gaunt."

She closed her mouth having finished her ritual words, and now waited for Gaunt to step forward and speak.

It would end here, one way or another. She had her wand. She had her allies. She prayed that would be enough. She knew it wouldn't.

Gaunt stepped forward to before the podium on which Katelyn's chair was raised, and turned to face the assembly. He spread his arms wide to encompass the whole hall, and summoned all his oratory.

"My fellow wizards, my noble lords, my siblings by blood," he began. "We are a people that have endured for a thousand times a thousand years, that have held the right to this world since its beginning. We are noble and pure, powerful and wise, granted the gifts that enable us to act as the world's sovereigns. Our claim is proper. We have the will and strength afforded us by our blood to uphold it."

"Yet we do not. And our place has been _usurped._"

"A force of destruction, a force that by all rights should be ours to control, rose to destroy the hallowed Wizard Empires of antiquity! And that force, that evil and calculating force which we call _mugglekind_, places itself as lords of creation. It demanded, and took by force what was ours, what is truly ours, and which must be ours again!"

"But mugglekind is not merely content to stamp us down, to see us pushed down to the level which they should occupy, to see us beaten and cringing and hiding. It will not be satisfied with incitement and slavery and acts of terror. It wishes to poison us in our very blood. _And it has done so._"

* * *

"Bloody … poxetten … staircases," gasped Cadogan, as he leapt off the last one, and ran briskly through the corridors to the Headmistress's office. His armour squeaked in protest as he ran, his cloak flapped behind him, his breath came out in gasps. His numb leg almost slipped several times on the floor. He kept a tight hold on the small chest of evidence, retrieved from his pony's saddlebags.

He didn't notice the figure that followed him.

He came to the doorway outside the Headmistress's office, to the the grinning gargoyle that sprouted from the front. It turned to face him, and opened its mouth to greet him in an appropriately mocking manner, then fell silent when it saw the look on his face.

"No back-and-forth." he said quietly, his eyes adding all the tone he needed. "No banter. No obstructionism. Just tell the Headmistress that I have what she needs for the council."

The gargoyle blinked, then licked its stone lips nervously.

"Couldn't help you even if I wanted to," it said. "She's not in residence."

"What?"

"She's at the council. You're half an hour too late, she went down, and it's been officially in session for a couple of minutes."

"Blast it!" Cadogan turned, thinking. He had to get it to her, even if he interrupted the council by doing so. But what might that do? Would Gaunt have grounds to take immediate satisfaction if it was interrupted? What might he trigger? How was he going to do this?

He paused and thought, oblivious to the figure that drifted stealthily to his side, and unaware of him until it pressed a wand against him and whispered "_Petrificus Totalus._"

Cadogan, taken by surprise, tried to turn and face the figure, but found that he couldn't. His body refused to move, his muscles refused to obey his commands. A gentle shiver ran through his entire person, numbing his nerves and muscles, stopping movement the moment it looked like materialising.

Only his eyes could blink, only his lungs could breath, only his heart could beat. He was paralysed, and he panicked as he fought against the magic binding him.

The figure reached out and gently pushed on the still knight, keeling him over and sending him to the ground with a clatter. He rolled onto his back, still locked in the same pose, his eyes rolling in their sockets and looking up at the figure who had frozen him.

Lord Black, the lord at the Christmas Feast, looked down at Cadogan with desperation. His wand wobbled in his hand, his breathing came harsh and arrhythmic.

"I am sorry, muggle," he said, imploring the mute Cadogan. "I bear your breed no great ill will. But I saw you running with purpose up the stairs as I came in. I saw how Gaunt regarded you at the feast. I know that you might be a danger to him." He knelt down, and prised the chest from Cadogan's arms.

"I can't let him lose," whispered Horatio Black. "I can't let him think I'm a liability. _He has my son._ I can't let you get to him." He held the box under one arm, and held his wand over the paralysed knight.

* * *

"I would have thought that … well, you could do anything with magic. Regrow their arms and flesh like that," said Trilby. He stood with Katherine in the infirmary, paying a visit to the Malfoy twins at her insistence. They lay in their beds, breathing the slow breaths of sleep. Corvus lay with his stump wound with clean white cloth, his bare chest slavered with some evil-smelling poultice. Hydra lay with one side of her head bandaged, covering an eye.

"It isnae quite that easy," said Katherine softly, trying not to wake them.

"You can be certain it isn't that easy," muttered Healer Kelley, the school physician. He was bent over the twins, checking their breathing, and from time to time muttering soft incantations as he slowly tapped the bandages with his wand. "Magic, you see, isn't a force that lends itself easily to delicacy and subtlety. You've got to concentrate on it to make it do exactly what you want, and that means you've got to focus like an arrowpoint when you're dealing with lives."

"So it isn't a matter of just waving a wand and wishing it away?"

"I'm a Healer, not a miracle-worker. Something as intricate as a human body's got to be handled with extreme care and focus, and it's a drawn process when trying to heal wounds left by magic. Yes, I can do it faster than any muggle doctor. Yes, I can use the magic inherent in various plants and animal parts to accelerate the process. Merlin's beard, I can even give the lad an arm again. There are spells around that can make limbs of living metal. But they're still hardly going to be up and fighting any time soon."

They regarded the breathing twins in silence. Trilby shuffled uncomfortably. He had never liked infirmaries, in any shape or form. Katherine watched them with a sense of solemn duty. Her mother was occupied with the mad bastard downstairs, so it fell to her to attend her mother's allies.

There was a weak cough, and Hydra's eye flickered open for the second time in as many hours.

"Tha … aa … Gau …" she slurred, through battered lips, reaching a hand weakly for her face.

"Settle down, my lady," murmured Kelley, mopping her exposed brow with a moist cloth. "Get your rest. I'll get you back in shape. I promise."

Hydra shifted uncomfortably. Her open eye passed over Trilby, settled amicably on Katherine, and travelled to the doorway.

She then started in the bed, and tried to struggle up, her mouth forming sounds.

"Be … hind _you_ …" she hissed, grabbing at an empty side table for a non-existent wand.

"What?" said Trilby, and turned, then stopped, frozen with alarm.

In the doorway, there stood three men, wearing heavy dark robes. The one in the middle was powerfully-built and stocky, with iron-grey hair and broad, grim features. He held a wand before him, as did the men to his left and right, who could have been him minus twenty years.

"Lord Umbridge?" said Katherine, instantly suspicious. "What are ye …?"

"Silence," the man growled. "Don't speak. Don't reach for your wand. We're here for the Malfoys."

"Like hell you are," snarled Kelley, looking up.

"Don't try to interfere," the man said. "Lord Gaunt heard they'd survived. I'm here to finish the job, and to make sure they don't get in his way again. Stand aside, all of you. Or I and my boys won't hesitate to curse you dead."

Trilby was frozen. The man's wand tip hovered in the air before his solar plexus. Katherine reached down a hand for her own wand, but one of the man's sons aimed his own wand at her, and she stopped, faze blazing with anger and frustration. Kelley made an inarticulate noise of fury.

"Last chance," said Lord Umbridge. "Stand aside or die."


	20. Cards on the Table

Trilby stood stock still, the wand tip held scant inches from his chest, his hands raised slightly.

He looked at the man before him, and knew that talking his way out of this situation with his usual mixture of gentle words and veiled insults wasn't an option.

He knew that Katherine was ready to fight, but that she risked being struck down before she could so much as raise her wand.

He knew that the Healer would be likewise unable to strike.

He knew that the Malfoys had no wands on their person, in addition to being disabled. They couldn't fight. Only one was even conscious.

And he knew, with a kind of plodding finality, that he would have to deal with this. The wizard lord regarded him with chilly contempt, mocking what he saw as a useless and idiotic animal.

"You must be one of the vermin invited here by the Headmistress," said Lord Umbridge. He prodded Trilby's front with the wand. There was a hiss of smoke as the tip glowed hot, and Trilby gasped with pain as it burned a hole through his surcoat and leather. "Are you going to be a good muggle? Are you going to toe the line?"

Trilby swallowed, and said, in a low, nervous voice, "My lord, do you know something people always forget about me?"

Lord Umbridge blinked, irate and baffled by the ridiculous query of the muggle's. "You what?"

Trilby breathed out, let his hands drift slowly down (ever so slowly, ever so imperceptibly, ever so carefully, until it hovered a few inches above Lord Umbridge's wand), and fixed the man with his most disarming smile.

Then he said, "My lord, I'm Sir Cadogan's squire."

Lord Umbridge blinked, nonplussed, in the same second as Trilby acted.

His left hand made a downward grab, blurring down and seizing the wand tight and twisted it, pointing it down at the floor. As Lord Umbridge opened his mouth, Trilby slugged him as as hard as he could in the jaw with his right hand, with a audible crack from the man's mouth and a sharp pain from his knuckles.

The man reeled, and Trilby slammed his knee up between Lord Umbridge's legs, making him collapse and loosing his grip on his wand enough for Trilby to pull it free. He swept his hand behind him with one movement, releasing the wand and sending it flying towards Hydra on the infirmary bed. He reached behind him with his right hand as well, and both hands flourished weapons that had been held through his belt. A gleaming short sword appeared in his right hand, a hatchet in his left.

One of the sons pointed his wand away from Katherine to Trilby, too slowly. Katherine's wand leapt towards him and spewed red light with a cry of "_Stupefy!_" from the girl. The red light hammered into the son, and knocked him backwards hard into the corridor. His head cracked against the wall, and he slumped on the ground.

The remaining son swept his wand forwards and snarled "_Incen..._"

He only got halfway through the incantation before from behind Trilby, there was a spat "_Incarcerous,_" and a tangle of ropes that bounded overhead and engulfed the son with a whirlwind of hemp and a muffled yell. He fell struggling and stricken to the floor, looking like a mummified figure wrapped around with rope.

It had been three seconds since Trilby had grabbed at Lord Umbridge's wand, and all three wizards were down. Trilby was poised in a knife-fighter's stance, his sword and axe held before him. Katherine stood like a duelist, her wand angled before her. Hydra lay in her bed, her one eye blazing, her acquired wand held lazily in front of her.

Corvus stirred in his sleep. Healer Kelley could only stare.

Trilby coughed, embarrassed, and held his weapons loosely by his sides and stood upright.

"It's not all making smart remarks at him that I do," he said, to no-one. "There's training as well. He likes training."

"Who?" said Katherine.

"Sir Cadogan," said Trilby, spinning his weapons in his hands. "He made me take advantage of being naturally ambidextrous. He made me train with … Sir Cadogan!" He turned to face the others. "They came for us. Gaunt must be making his move. Sir Cadogan will be in danger as well!"

"He'll have men securing the school," said Katherine, taking a firmer grip on her wand. "That mad bastard'll take power, whether he wins support in the Great Council or no. We have tae find them. We have tae fight them."

"More … than that," hissed Hydra. She pushed herself up in the bed. "We went out last night to secure evidence against Gaunt. Your mother planned to use it against him in the Council. The knight must have found it in the tower, before he went out looking for us. He must have it on him. Is he awake?"

"I saw out the window someone in armour running towards the school," volunteered the nervous Kelley. "Could that be the knight?"

"Has to be," said Trilby. "There must be wizards of Gaunt's after him as well. Katherine, stay here with the Malfoys. I'll get to him and make sure whatever evidence there is gets to your mother safely."

"Tae hell with that," said Katherine. "Ye'll get cut tae collops at a distance if there's anymore of Gaunt's creatures in the corridors. I'll go with ye. Maister Kelley, please stay here. Make sure the twins dinnae get hurt."

"Healer Kelley will have a job on his hands keeping up with me," said Hydra. "Be so good as to get me one of those portable chairs from out of the cupboard, squire."

"What? No!" said Trilby, Katherine and Kelley in unison.

"Why not? You'll have a free hand, Katherine. You'll be able to push me. You'll need every wand you can get, and I'm the deadliest duelist in Britain."

"Maybe ye are," said Katherine, looking at the injuries on the woman critically. "But ye're also wounded near tae death, ye've lost a ocean's worth of blood, ye cannae so much as walk, and ye're using a borrowed wand besides."

"We have to level the playing field for Gaunt's creatures somehow, don't we?" Hydra shook her head irritably. "I will see this finished, if I have to crawl to its conclusion. Help me and get me a chair, won't you?"

"You..." began Kelley. Hydra froze him with a death glare.

"Healer Kelley, you will ensure that no harm comes to my brother. I intend to make sure that harm will come upon Gaunt's creatures. Now kindly get me a chair."

* * *

"Our blood, the blood of wizardkind, the blood that flowed in Merlin's and Zoroaster's and Cain's veins, has been _fouled_. By the copulations of our kind with vermin. They breed impurity, an impurity that will wither us, root and branch!"

Gaunt raved to the wizards, his eyes afire with a terrible, clear zealotry, his words punctuated with sweeps of his arms and hand gestures. His followers were enthralled. His enemies shrank back from the torrent of fury.

"My brothers and sisters of wizardkind, we must not allow this. We cannot allow mugglekind to rise unopposed, to rise forever and to grind us down into the dust. We, from this day, shall suffer this outrage no longer. We shall preserve our hallowed blood and race, and put an end to the breeding of half-bastards and the coddling of mudbloods."

"_And we shall strike back._"

* * *

There was a brief, superfluous argument which Hydra won, and which concluded with Kelley reluctantly helping her seat herself in one of his portable chairs. They were his own design, a chair fabricated from light woods and framing, and based with four wheels allowing it to move. Two bone handles jutted from the back, which Katherine held.

"Tae reiterate, ye're insane."

"Oh, pish. If there's ever a time that called for insanity, this is it."

"No, the problem at this time is that there's_ tae much_ insanity, no tae little."

"Ladies? Priorities," said Trilby. He stood by the door impatiently, his sword and hatchet ready. Katherine grunted and pushed Hydra over, gathering speed.

"Keep Corvus safe," called Hydra over her back to Healer Kelley as they left. "And make sure he doesn't try to exert himself, it'll be bad for him."

"Pots, kettles," muttered Katherine.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Where are we headed?" said Trilby, stepping briskly along the corridor, ushering them on. "What's the quickest route to the ground floor?"

"There's a staircase just a corridor doon from my mum's office. We'll make for there," said Katherine, pushing Hydra with greater force and speed, her wand in her hand and pressed against one of the handles.

"The council's already underway, isn't it?" said Trilby, picking up speed. They were nearing a corner in the wide corridor.

"Indeed. So let's hu..." began Hydra, and stopped when they suddenly rounded the corner and found themselves face to face with five dark-robed wizards and witches, all of them lesser scions of House Umbridge. They had heard the group's footsteps, and had their wands ready. They were clustered halfway along the short corridor, at the end of which suits of armour stood at attention.

"_Protego!_" Her injured state didn't stop Hydra summoning a Shield Charm with the lightning-reflexes of a born duelist, and the sudden wall of force that sprung up sent the several curses sent at them skittering and spiralling off in all directions, detonating and carving chunks out of the wall and floor.

One surprised wizard was on the wrong side of the Shield, and Trilby streaked for him before he could get a curse off. His sword flicked out and slashed the wizard's wand hand, dropping his wand to the floor and sending droplets of blood flying from the gash across his hand. The wizard stepped back with a cry, and Trilby stepped forwards with a blow from his hatchet. The blunt side slammed into the the side of the wizard's head, dropping him unconscious on the ground.

"Yes! Come on! Who's next?" snarled Trilby, his face locked in a wild grin. "Who's next?"

The wizards and witches on the other side of the Shield looked at each other, and one witch stepped forward. Her face was obscured by a cowl, and she grasped a long, thick wand tightly in her hand.

"Me," she said. "_Lucius Gladius._" The wand in her wand shimmered , and suddenly the ghost of a long bastard sword appeared around it, formed by countless motes of shimmering bronze light. Trilby stared.

She pivoted on her heel and slashed the blade of light along the Shield, making it splutter and vanish with a few confused flickers of magic. She angled the blade at Trilby, and then charged. He met her halfway, raising his own short sword to catch her overhead strike, and barely stepped back in time when the magical sword sheared through his own steel. The blade clattered to the ground with a ringing sound, and the witch pressed her attack.

Then all hell broke loose.

"_Bombarda!_" cried Katherine, sweeping her own wand at a section of floor before the wizards, which obligingly exploded up in a shower of marble chunks, battering them back with pained grunts. One of them stabbed out and hissed "_Incendio,_" and Katherine barely ducked in time to avoid the tongue of flame that slashed overhead.

"_Incendio,_" retorted Hydra, casually waving her own wand and showing the Umbridges how the spell was _really_ done. Fire roared at them in a great cone from the wand's tip like dragon's breath, catching the robes of one who didn't step back in time, the one who had originally cast the fire spell. He screamed and slapped at his front, and made himself an easy target for Hydra's "_Stupefy!_"

The stopping, dropping and rolling across the floor he did put the flames out, at least.

"_Protego,_" yelled the remaining witch, summoning a Shield between the group and herself and her brother. To one side, Trilby and the witch continued their furious duel.

The Umbridges waited and panted, fixing Hydra and Katherine with looks of loathing.

"You're the Malfoy bitch and Katelyn's whelp," spat the wizard. "You're sure as hell not getting past. You can't send a curse past this."

Katherine regarded the corridor behind them with a calculating gaze while Hydra glowered. Then she released the chair and stepped forward. She stopped before the Shield, and casually raised her wand to one side, tapping it against the wall. The Umbridges looked at her, baffled.

"Not curses, no," said Katherine carefully. "But other spells will." She ground her wand tip gently into the wall and said "_Armatum Pugnae_." A shiver of light emerged from her wand and pulsed along the wall passing by the Shield and speeding past the Umbridges.

"What the hell did you just ..." said the witch, and then concluded "Unnkh," and sank to the floor. The wizard turned just in time to meet headfirst the butt of a spear grasped by one of the suits of armour. He fell as well, and a rumbled emerged from the depths of the armour, a vague, semi-sentient noise of satisfaction. The Shield flickered and vanished.

Trilby, in the meanwhile, was dodging and swerving crazily to avoid the wild slashes from the witch's sword of light. She laughed madly as she attacked, in a rough, untrained style that more than made up for it's unrefinedness with the weapon that could cut through other weapons.

"Die!" she laughed, as the blade whistled and spun and Trilby dodged. "Die! Die! Die..."

She unbalanced for one critical moment, and Trilby reacted with lightning precision. He struck at the side of her head with the hatchet's blunt side, but she ducked to avoid the brunt of the blow. The axe glanced painfully off the tip of her head, and she slammed her elbow brutally into Trilby's crotch. He cried out and fell over backwards, the hatchet tumbing from his hand. She stepped over him, her sword upraised.

"You were a good fight," she said. "I'll give you that much. But now it's time to ..."

"Petrificus Totalus," said Hydra. Light flashed around the witch, and she froze in her pose , before falling over to one side.

"First rule of duelling: Fighting fair is for other people," commented Hydra as Trilby made his way back upright by degrees, gasping in pain all the while. He staggered and swayed, looking from the alert suits of armour to Hydra. She met his gaze.

"That was … well done, from what I saw of it," he managed, between groans.

"I told ye I was good at reanimating the suits of armour," she replied. "Though that is the first time I've put them tae a mair practical use than childhood games."

"Yes, yes, very useful," said Hydra. "Let's keep moving. Gaunt won't wait for us. And stop _moaning_, boy, just walk it off."

* * *

"We will become a true nation, a united force of wizards from the world over, destined to overthrow muggle rule and to restore the Wizard Empire! We will claim the world under one ruler! Under one supreme law! Under the security, safety, justice, and peace of magic!"

"Join me! Make our greatest desire a reality. Give order to this fractured world once more, where we can rule, and restore muggles to their proper, _subservient_ place."

* * *

They rounded one last corner, the suits of armour forming a steel vanguard. They were in the corridor holding the doorway to the Headmistress's office.

They saw Lord Black standing over Sir Cadogan, with a wand in one hand and a small chest in the other.

He was surprised by their arrival, so intent was he upon the paralysed knight, and it was the work of a moment for Hydra to swish her wand and snap "_Stupefy_!", sending him flying back through the air in a tangle of limp limbs. He impacted with the far wall hard enough to leave a long crack running up it, and he fell to the ground with a release of stunned breath.

"Sir Cadogan!" yelled Trilby, running to the stricken knight.

"_Finite Incantatum,_" said Katherine, a rush of pale light rushing from her wand and seeping into the knight. He coughed, rolled onto his belly, and pushed himself up with his arms.

"Gods. That wasn't an experience I'd ever wish to revisit," he muttered. "Being helpless isn't …" He blinked and looked up at them. "That was fortuitous. I'm indebted to you all. I take it you had trouble on the way here? I could hear the fighting, even if he couldn't." He gestured at the unconscious Lord Black.

"Only a little trouble, nothing to concern yourself about," said Trilby, reaching down and helping Cadogan to his feet. He muttered his thanks even as he glanced at Trilby's sheared-through sword, jammed awkwardly through his belt. He raised a brow, but said nothing. He stooped down and picked up the chest of evidence.

"Whatever trouble you got into, you're about to get into even more," said Cadogan, hefting the chest. "We have to get this into the council and to the Headmistress."

"The council's currently in session. We might cause a stir," said Hydra dryly. "And heavens know how there would be talk afterwards."

"Well, they're going to have a hell of a lot to talk about," said Cadogan, drawing out his poleaxe. Hydra eyed it, as did Katherine and Trilby.

"What's that in aid of?" enquired Katherine.

"It's in aid of getting attention, and of stating intent," said Cadogan firmly. "Now come on. Let's go cause a stir. And fulfil our duty."

* * *

"From this moment onwards, we shall become that great nation! We shall fall upon mugglekind and on our own impurities like a cleansing fire, and secure our rightful dominion over all!"

"I move to cast aside the Masquerade! To abandon our fear, and to claim what was ours, and to realise that magic is might! Follow me, and I shall lead us once into an era of glory!

"All those in favour, say AYE!"

Gaunt finished his tirade, to the screaming, exulting, fired crowd of wizards. The cries of dissenters and supporters alike were carried around the Great Hall like a roll of thunder, erupting and threatening violence. Katelyn took a firmer grip on her wand at her side, and waited for the response. She knew that, come what may, wizard and muggle blood would pour in rivers before this business would be done.

But before Gaunt could get his response, a new sound rung out around the hall, cutting the shouting off abruptly. It was a crash at the main door, that seemed to echo forever in the suddenly hushed chamber.

Gaunt frowned, and peered closely at the door. Wizards alternately shuffled towards or away from it.

There was another crash, louder than the first. There was upheaval.

Then one last crash sounded, and the doors flew in, the locks at their centre smashed to splinters and twisted metal.

Sir Cadogan stood in the doorframe, the light from the torches behind him making him a silhouette amidst the cloud of splinters and dust. From one hand dangled a small, innocuous chest. In the other, a great poleaxe gleamed.

He marched forward, slamming the poleaxe's butt into the ground with every step for emphasis. His visor was closed, his expression was unreadable, his determination was all that was clear. He headed directly for Gaunt, past the muttering, startled wizards and witches on either side. Gaunt looked at the approaching knight levelly, with an expression that could have been carved from stone.

The knight stopped six paces distant from the wizard lord, and stood his ground.

"Lord Nachlan Gaunt of House Gaunt," said the knight, in loud, clear tones made faintly metallic and ringing by the steel around his face, "You stand here accused of plotting to breach the Masquerade, of murder, of torture, of consorting with foreign mercenaries, and of the foul slaughter of innocents."

He threw the chest of evidence down at Gaunt's feet with a retort that echoed around the room. Gaunt looked down at it, and kicked it open. Papers and reagents and other articles of the evidence collected by the FitzWeasleys over two long years manifested on the floor.

"There stands evidence of these crimes, sufficient to prove you guilty in the eyes of men, as you are guilty in the eyes of God."

Gaunt's eyes narrowed. That was all that changed on his face.

He could put it to a trial, Cadogan knew. He could use the evidence as it had been intended, and allow it to prove his crimes true. Gaunt would brought down. His plans would be ruined.

That, however, could not be a option. Gaunt was cunning. He was currently sitting on a vast amount of support. He could simply force away a trial, and snatch away power here and now with the support of his allies, and wizardkind would inevitably follow.

That left another option. One he had been told existed in wizarding law. One that had parallels in muggle law. One that, although it was dicey as all hell, left little wiggle room for Gaunt, not without losing a great deal of face. He could not escape this particular trial.

"Before these witnesses and before the Headmistress and before all wizard authority, I, Sir Cadogan of the lonely road, a knight in the service of mugglekind, do challenge you to a duel to determine the truth of the matter. A trial by battle, to let God's judgement shine through in our contest and to lend strength to the just. To the _death_."

Sir Cadogan slammed his poleaxe once more on the ground, to punctuate his point.

Privately, he thought it was a hell of an entrance.

Gaunt looked coldly at him, while the wizards all around started talking all at once. Katelyn gawped. Behind him, Trilby and Katherine and Hydra started talking loudly. The Weasleys and Greengrasses and Torques and Prewetts and Canmores and Parkinsons all shouted out, and all were ignored.

"Challenge accepted, vermin," said Gaunt, quietly, mercilessly, coldly.


	21. Dragon Slaying

In the few minutes following that declaration, several things happened.

For one thing, the Hall became as close a rendition of pure chaos as could be created.

For another, Katelyn stood up out of her chair and fired a Detonation Charm into the air to quiet the storm of noise that sprung up all around her.

"I invoke the rights of arbitration and amendment for this issued duel, as granted me by my home hearth and my prerogative as Headmistress of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry," she thundered over the madding crowd. "And I say that ye shall _not_ fight to the death! There has not been a death arisen from a Great Council in six hundred years, and it will not begin now! Even now," she declared over the protests from both fighters. "The conclusion shall be tae the last wind. When one of ye can no longer fight, it shall be over."

"Lady Canmore," said Gaunt smoothly, his fanatical oratory fading and being replaced with his usual chilly and slippery charm, "In this, I must oppose you. This … _animal_ has challenged me to the death. I very much wish to oblige it. I will not ..."

"The whole point is to _kill_ this churl," said Cadogan at the same time. "What are you ..."

"You, wheesht," said Katelyn briskly, waving a hand briskly at Cadogan and focusing on Gaunt. Her eyes glittered like chips of black ice.

"Dae ye remember my assistant, Hadrian Dunbar?" she said to Gaunt, her voice cutting through the hubbub despite its quietness. "Dae ye mind of Professor Deverill? Dae ye mind of the children of London?" Gaunt stayed silent, his face locked in an absence of expression. Katelyn walked forward, dismounted the podium, and stopped in front of him.

"Gie me an excuse, Gaunt, any at all," she said, "And it willnae be the knight who spills your blood." Gaunt looked down at her, with a foot's advantage on her. He turned away quickly and into a group of his supporters, who milled around him as they fired off questions and querulous entreaties. He froze them all with a look, and they trailed after him as he walked on.

Katelyn turned and looked at Cadogan. Try as he might, the knight couldn't make out the emotions behind her expression. They contradicted each other, despair clashing with hope and anger matching itself against satisfaction. She spoke after a few moments of that expression had passed.

"Ye brought yerself intae this revel," she said. "Dance for all your worth." With that she turned aside and called for the Wizengamot. Several older witches and wizards peeled away from the crowd, nobles who had been deemed wise enough to rule on matters of justice. The Wizengamot got their heads together, and debated the conditions for the duel in hushed, frantic tones.

Cadogan leaned on his poleaxe. His leg's numbness had returned suddenly, and he supported himself to prevent himself falling over in an undignified fashion.

Trilby and Katherine stepped up behind him.

"Sir?"

"What is it, lad?"

"You know what happened just there? Where you just challenged the mad wizard to a duel to the death?"

"What of it?"

"Were you, perchance, planning on _warning_ us at any point before you did that? Because if I'm going to be obliged to summon a priest to perform your last rites, I'd like to be informed in advance."

"Trilby, there's a time and a place for your particular style of motivation. This isn't it."

"For whit it's worth, Trilby," said Katherine, placing a hand on his shoulder, "My mum's bought your knight a fighting chance. Gaunt could have killed him with one spell, and ended everything there. This way, they'll fight until one of them is tae injured to fight on."

"Oh, I see," said Trilby dully. "So no horrific death curses. Just a fair, straight up fight. My master with his poleaxe and shield and battered armour, against a man who can damn well control the elements. Is that the way of it?"

"I can take him, Trilby," said Cadogan. "He isn't invulnerable. And he'll expect an easy victory in his arrogance. I mean to prove him wrong."

"He has _reasons_ for expecting an easy victory. Sir, you can't win this fight."

"I've walked into a hundred fights others told me I couldn't win, and I've proved them wrong."

"In those other fights, your opponents couldn't damn well make merry with the laws underpinning the bloody firmament!"

They argued in their own little circle at the centre of the room, ignoring the stir around them. Wizard lords and ladies bickered and shouted and cast astonished glances from one combatant to the other. There was bewilderment and contempt and blank incredulity cast in Sir Cadogan's direction. So was more than a little admiration.

Katelyn and the Wizengamot finished their hushed and frantic conferral, and the most senior of the Wizengamot stood forward to address the crowd. She was a tiny, wizened witch, her eyes milky with cataracts, and her voice was greatly amplified by the wand she held against her neck.

"The duel issued by the knight-ambassador Cadogan against Lord Nachlan Gaunt has been lawfully altered with the Headmistress's rights of amendment. After deliberation, the Lords Justicar have deemed the duel proper under wizarding law, and have decided upon the best conditions so that justice may be served."

"The duel shall be to the last wind, with any weapons chosen by the combatants, by the Ironlith."

* * *

It wasn't the first time justice had been done at the Ironlith. The procedures for preparing a duel there had thousand-year-old precedent in wizarding annals, and the scars of past duels revealed themselves on the standing iron's surface after a cursory inspection.

Teams of house-elfs struggled with shovels and beams of directed flame to clear away the layer of snow covering the clearing. Wizards mingled and muttered at the sides and in the woods, an assembled audience for the turn of events. The Wizengamot worked strange concerted magic in a circle around the Ironlith itself.

Sir Cadogan stood with Trilby and Katherine at one side, checking his equipment for the umpteenth time.

"Poleaxe," Cadogan said, tapping the handle of it above his right shoulder, the weapon slung across his back. "Shield," he said, hefting the shield he held in his left hand. "Dagger," and he reached down and checked that it was securely fastened in its sheath across one greave.

"Functioning cerebrum?" enquired Trilby.

"Trilby..." began Cadogan wearily, as he pulled down the visor on his greathelm.

"That … I apologise, sir. I'm sure you've got a functioning cerebrum."

"Good."

"But where you're keeping it is up for dispute."

"Trilby!"

There was a sudden echoing silence from the Wizengamot's ritual. Standing in a circle around the great standing iron, they began to pace slowly backwards, holding their wands before them and muttering under their breath. Soft lightning-blue lines appeared from the Ironlith and locked onto the wand tips, and were dragged out and stretched as the Wizengamot walked backwards. They moved out at an equal pace, stopping about ten metres distant from the Ironlith on all sides.

They flicked the wands, and the ends of the lines connected to the Ironlith suddenly rose to the top of the megalith. The Wizengamot then knelt in tandem, touching the wand tips to the ground and curving the lines to form a great wide framework, a glowing blue skeleton of a dome.

As one, they chanted "_Protego Claustra,_" and lines of spidering force leapt from curved frame to curved frame, forming a latticed dome of shimmering energy. They drew their wands back, releasing the lines, and the structure solidified, flickered briefly, and then settled in its shape.

It was a dome six metres high at its top and extending ten metres out at the base. The blue lines of the frame had vanished, and the whole thing was glassy and transparent, with only ripples in the distorted air marking it out. Snowflakes that fell upon it sizzled and vanished with a tiny pulse of blue energy. Most of the Wizengamot peeled away to watch the duel from different angles, while four remained, two at a side, raising their wands into the air at the same height and disrupting the dome-matter, forming two doorways at either end.

Sir Cadogan rose to his full height (five feet two, including the helmet), drew out his poleaxe and held his shield lightly, breathed out, and said "Trilby? As of the end of this, whether I'm the victor or not … you'll take the title of 'Sir' from here on."

Trilby looked up, astonished. "I … knighthood?"

"Yes. You've learned as much as I can teach you, you've proven yourself in battle a number of times in my service, and when you thought I might be in trouble earlier, you went instantly to my side to try and protect me, without thought to your own safety, didn't you?" Cadogan smiled. "Highest marks for morality under difficult circumstances. Especially while protecting women and the injured."

Trilby's mouth opened and shut, temporarily bereft of words.

"Oh, and one more thing, lad. You fought your way past several wizards to get to me, did you not? Yet here you stand in one piece." Cadogan held his poleaxe across his shoulder. "I won't be long."

With that, he turned and walked off to the doorway in the duelling dome, his pace steady and determined.

"Sir?" Trilby called after him. Cadogan didn't stop walking, but he turned his head.

"Do you have any idea what you're doing?"

Sir Cadogan stopped to consider the question, then said, thoughtfully, "You know, I believe I might play this one by ear."

Then he continued forwards and stepped through the doorway. The two members of the Wizengamot dropped their wands to their sides, and the magic sealed the opening once more with a faint crackle. There was the sound of the same thing happening from the dome's other side.

The crowd of wizards immediately pressed forward to the dome's sides, peering raptly through the blurred sides at the two combatants separated by the pillar of iron.

Trilby and Katherine stood together, watching Sir Cadogan's advance towards the murky figure of Gaunt.

"This is absurd tae bring up at a time like this," began Katherine, "But dae ye mind of when we were talking about our personal history?"

"Yes. What about it?"

"Well, I remember asking ye whit your family name was. I think ye changed the subject."

"Oh. My family name. Right." Trilby coughed, embarrassed. "It's … ah, nothing to hide, really, just a bit silly. The kind of name that gets you teased silly when you're a child. From other noble progeny."

"Whit is it?"

"It's … ah, it's Longbottom."

"Trilby Longbottom," said Katherine slowly, carefully. Then she smiled. "Dinnae fash yourself. It's a guid name."

* * *

The interior of the dome was still and quiet, the noise of the crowd outside reduced to a faint murmur, the falling snow reduced to faint diamond-blue ripples across the outside of the overhanging dome.

Cadogan paced forward, in an wide arc around the Ironlith, his footing sure and steady.

Gaunt rose from the other side.

He walked surely, confidently, dark duelling robes speckled with snow. His face was set in that damn twisted smirk, and his hands were closed tight around two wands. One, in his right hand, was a wand of normal length, a carved willow stick with a dark metal handle. In his left, he held reversed a smaller wand, a main-gauche to his main. He carried them with ease, with the surety that came of mastery.

Cadogan raised his shield, and moved his poleaxe into a guard position.

"At ease, animal," said Gaunt. "We commence when the horn blows, not before."

"You sent that fear-eating monster after me," said Cadogan, stopping eight metres distant from the wizard. "You tried to kill me from a distance, like a poisoner, like a coward. I swore I'd take the blood-price from you for that. I shall."

"I have no reason to fear this duel," said Gaunt. "I will hurt you, vermin. I will show these assembled lords your breed's worth. I will take what is rightfully wizardkind's when they flock to my banner."

"You'll take nothing, coward. You're already nothing, and I'll make you less than that."

"You're powerless before me," said Gaunt with cool contempt. "I'll break you, and the blood of your breed will run in wide rivers through this land and wipe it clean. Starting with you and your squire."

Sir Cadogan's eyes narrowed.

Then there came from the outside the quieted, tremulous, wailing sound of a horn. Gaunt's smile widened, and became sharper. He angled his main-gauche before him, and raised his wand above his head. Cadogan and Gaunt began to walk, slowly but gathering speed as they went, with weapons ready and faces set.

Cadogan sped to a charge, his patched crimson cloak flying behind him like a oriflamme. His legs hammered across the ground as he sped like an arrow directly at Gaunt, his poleaxe raised and gleaming. Gaunt's own lean strides ate up the distance, his gaze fixing the knight like a hawk.

"_Incandes,_" hissed Gaunt, suddenly spinning his wand in his upraised hand, and sending fire circling around it. It sped and gathered mass, orbiting his wand faster and faster in a ring of flame. Sir Cadogan's gaze flicked up to it, too late realising that that was the spell's purpose.

"_Diffindo!_" snapped Gaunt, slashing out with his main-gauche and sending a burst of light from the little wand at the chainmail covering Cadogan's right wrist. It burst, opening a gash across Cadogan's arm with a flicker of falling steel rings and a splatter of red blood, and the knight hissed in pain, caught off guard by the sudden, spiteful attack. The main-gauche lashed out again with a shout of "_Expelliarmus!_"

The poleaxe in Cadogan's grip was abruptly swiped away, as it a giant had knocked it from his hand, and it landed in the thin snow a couple of metres away. Cadogan cursed and swerved too slowly to retrieve it.

Gaunt's main-gauche stabbed out with a murmured "_Crucio._"

Cadogan, in a decades-long career, had faced ranks of charging, snarling bandits, stone walls, berserkers and champions, and flights of arrows turning the earth to a black-fletched sea. None of them had stopped him.

But that spell did the trick.

He was caught as if by a rush of gale-strength wind, every nerve in his body shrieking and stopping him mid-stumble. Nothing had ever hurt so much. Invisible fire raced down his veins and tore him open. He lurched, the only thing coming from his mouth a shocked, strangled gasp.

Then Gaunt twisted the wand in his grasp, redirecting and directing the pain of the spell, and Cadogan fell to his knees. His hands caught his fall, barely, and he wheezed brokenly as he stared down at the ground. The agony continued to course.

He knew that if he stayed down, he would surely lose. Bringing forth every strand of determination and will he could, he tried to rise, raising his torso first from where he was bent double. It was an uphill battle against the torture-spell, which ripped at him with a manic glee.

A shadow fell over him. He raised his head (with no little effort) to see Gaunt's wide, monstrous smile, which held steady as Gaunt brought down his wand-arm with cold deliberation, the circling wide wheel of fire around it playing and tugging at the air.

The wand subtly shifted position in Gaunt's grasp, and the fire suddenly screamed out from the tip, directed as a blazing cone that hammered into Cadogan's centre of mass and screamed like hollow thunder as the sheer heat of it hit Cadogan.

The world became an oven, roasting the kneeling Cadogan as he desperately raised his pain-wracked left arm and shield to try and take the force of the fire. The pain ripped at him and mocked his efforts, as the fire roasted him. He heard the sound of screaming, as if from a great distance. He couldn't tell whether it was from him, the sound of the fire streaming off his breastplate and in all directions, or from the crowd without.

Beyond the blazing orange haze that rose before his sweating visor, he saw Gaunt's wide white smile, as sure and happy as if the wizard had been watching a puppy at play. His wands were directed at Cadogan, unrelenting in the fire and pain they send upon him. Gaunt's bright brown eyes were creased with pleasure.

Cadogan's left arm twitched. He ran through the corridors of his mind, trying to compartmentalise the pain and force of heat, to push it away, to struggle against the will of Nachlan Gaunt.

Cadogan knew about pain. And he remembered enduring fire as well. The burn scarring that was half his face spoke to that.

With an almighty scream that was part raw determination, part pain, and part wild fury, he raised his left arm, and brought his shield whirling around in a blackened arc that swept past the cone of fire. And into Nachlan Gaunt's wands.

The shield edge smashed across Gaunt's hands, breaking the spells and knocking his wands and drawing a cry of pain from the wizard lord. The twisted edge of one part of the shield slashed a great cut across the top of his right hand. The impact smacked his main-gauche clean out his hands.

Cadogan threw himself upright, freed from the fire and pain, allowing new numb feeling to surge across his scarred nerves, as he rose with smoke flaring from his blackened armour and seared joints. He twisted and grabbed at his poleaxe on the ground, and he turned to Gaunt. The wizard had taken a few swift steps back, and was looking at his bleeding hand with shock. He looked at Cadogan, and the knight could _feel_ the fury behind Gaunt's eyes.

They leapt forward at the same time, the knight roaring a wordless battle cry, and Gaunt slashing the air red with snarled Stunning Spells. "_Stupefy! Stupefy! Stupefy!_"

Cadogan leapt aside from the first one, sending it whistling through the air and rebounding off the curved dome wall, where it burst harmlessly on the ground. The second was caught by his shield. It blasted into it, denting the thick metal and wood, but only slowed Cadogan for a moment. The third streamed overhead as Cadogan ducked.

He drove upon Gaunt in a blackened mass of steel, swiping his poleaxe in an overhead blur that slashed down Gaunt's chest and cut a thin crimson line down his torso with the spear point. Gaunt's wand dashed into Cadogan's throat, and as the knight choked, Gaunt snarled "_Flipendo!_" The spell knocked Cadogan head over heels, making him drop his shield as he landed on the ground with a clatter of metal and a pained release of breath. Gaunt stepped back again, gaining breathing space as Cadogan pulled himself to his feet once more.

Gaunt looked at the shield on the ground, angled his wand at it, and spat "_Bombarda!_" The shield exploded, sending metal shrapnel scything through the air and dashing into Cadogan. The splinters and shards of metal drew blood where they struck at joints protected only by a layer of scorched leather. Cadogan cursed with the sudden pain.

Gaunt stepped forward with grim determination, sending another Detonation Charm streaking at Cadogan, who avoided it with a last-minute jerk to one side. Gaunt then aimed at Cadogan's body and swished and flicked his wand. "_Alarte Ascendare._"

A great hand seemed to reach down and seize Cadogan, dragging him into the air with sudden force and speed and bringing him to an abrupt stop at the dome's top. He struck his back against it with a painful jar, his poleax falling out his grasp and falling the six metres to the ground.

He struggled like a pinned insect, watching Gaunt step briskly forward. The wizard reached out a hand, and sent his main-gauche flying back into it with a jerk of his fingers and a muttered incantation. He kept the main wand trained on Cadogan, keeping him pinned, while the little main-gauche spun in his fingers and gathered fire.

Cadogan struggled for all his worth. He knew that when he went into this fight that death was likely. He had expected that Gaunt might be his equal or superior in raw power, and the wizard was meeting these expectations.

But damn it, he would _not_ die like a thrashing trapped animal, unable to do anything but watch its death come closer.

He grabbed at his leg, contorting in the air to try and get the dagger in its sheath. He grasped the handle and slid it out with aching fingers. Gaunt was oblivious, focused as he was on the fire surrounding his main-gauche.

Sir Cadogan grasped the dagger's handle and threw it at Gaunt's sneering face. The blade gleamed silver and then red as it slashed a red line across the wizard's left cheek. Gaunt howled with pain and fell back, his scarred smile made symmetrical. His concentration broken, he was helpless to stop Cadogan falling to the ground. Something crunched with a jolt of pain as the knight fell on his front, and he loosed his own howl of pain at the sudden addition to his list of agonies.

But everything suddenly became much clearer and more tolerable as he focused suddenly on the hilt of his poleaxe within arm's reach. He grabbed it as he rose, and hurled himself straight at Gaunt as he howled a wordless cry of battle-anger and pain, unleashing all that he was in this last desperate charge.

Gaunt retreated before the onslaught. His main-gauche was dashed from his hand with a slap from the poleaxe, and only a split-second's reaction prevented the axehead from taking his fingers with it. He turned to avoid the upwards arc of the blade, and tried to summon another Torture Curse. The knight stepped quickly out of the spell's path, and lunged at Gaunt in a mad medley of steel and blood.

Steel rang. Curses detonated. Gaunt dodged nearly every swipe with the energy of a writhing serpent, but several blows drew blood regardless. The few spells that he snatched the concentration and time to fire off were avoided by the knight, now totally in his element.

Gaunt was now frantic, now suddenly fearful that this ridiculous animal in tin plate might actually be able to beat him. The brute was an engine of destruction with a blurring axe and the reflexes of a rapid dog. He was now throwing all his flagging energy into merely avoiding the crippling blows of the poleaxe. Outwith the dome, he could feel wizardkind watching with amazement and shock. Here was Nachlan Gaunt – Lord of House Gaunt and the destined saviour of wizardkind, being forced to retreat before a lowly muggle.

Shame jostled with panic for space in Gaunt's mind, stripping away all other rational thought. He had to win. He _had to_.

He dodged under another blow and spun aside to one side and, as the axe rose to follow him, he spun and screamed "_Avada Kedavra!_"

Green light blazed forth, and Sir Cadogan stood, for a moment, motionless in its glare. There was a cry from outwith the dome from the massed wizards -

- which rose in volume and ferocity when the knight bodily hurled himself back, falling on his arse on the frosty ground and sending the Killing Curse blazing into the Ironlith itself. A section of paleolithic rust was blasted apart and ran down the megalith's side in red rivulets. He dragged himself upright with a hiss of agony from his broken ribs. Gaunt stood panicked while the crowd without roared and the Wizengamot's eyes blazed with shock.

Gaunt had just aimed to kill in a duel to the last wind. He had violated a custom older than wizarding Britain.

Even when fighting muggles, though many of the crowd, you had to maintain standards. _Especially_ when fighting muggles, because how else could a wizard claim to be better than them?

The self-proclaimed saviour had broken his own honour. Even amongst his own supporters, the mood had taken several definite steps towards 'ugly'.

Gaunt, who knew this with a hollow certainty, felt that if he was in this for a Knut, he was in this for a Galleon. He spun the wand around his head once more, once more calling fire. But this time, the fire had an unholy texture to it, and seemed to lunge at the air of its own volition even as it was created.

Cadogan had just finished picking himself up, and had yet to retrieve his fallen axe when Gaunt screamed "_Fabrico Fiendfyre!_"

The wand tip screamed with orange light, and a sudden cone of fire billowed from it. Shapes streamed out of the fire, composing its whole, a mass of demons and dragons and monsters formed from nightmares that screamed and cackled as they bore down upon Cadogan.

The knight left his poleaxe, and dove under the oncoming cursed fire, the heat felt with the intensity of the sun as it passed above him. He grabbed at Gaunt in an ungainly tackle, sending the wizard tumbling to the ground and breaking his control over the flames.

The pair struggled and fought and battered at each other on the ground while the fires screamed overhead, glancing off the inside of the dome and filling the inside with a pulsing, broiling inferno. Wizards who stood too close to the sides fell back, so intense was the heat. The Wizengamot as one raised their wands, and dissipated the dome.

The inferno of Fiendfyre, which obscured the duelists, spilled out to be met by the counter-curses of the Wizengamot. One didn't become one of the most respected wizards in Britain by blind luck, and the force of the unleashed fire was met by streams of blue dispelling magic. The clash of the magic filled the air with a cacophony of thunder and a nova of unnatural colours.

After a few moments, the last of the Fiendfyre was beaten down, leaving a haze of white smoke and the last of the fading magic effects. Conjured winds swept away the smoke, gradually revealing two figure locked together, next to a pile of molten sludge that had once been the Ironlith.

Cadogan was on top of Gaunt, his armour thoroughly blackened and broken in places. If he felt pain, he didn't show it. He had one hand locked tight around Gaunt's throat, and his eyes were cold and steady beneath his visor.

Gaunt struggled weakly, to no avail. His clothing was scorched and tattered. His skin, were it showed, was cut and bruised. His wand lay to one side on the ground. He was beaten.

"Sir knight," called Katelyn Canmore, from behind the Wizengamot. "Ye can release him. It's over. Ye've won."

Slowly, carefully, masking his pain, the knight rose. He stood above Gaunt, gripping his side with one hand. Gaunt turned weakly to face the oncoming Wizengamot.

"Lord Gaunt," snapped the most of the Wizengamot, her voice sharp and clear across the cold day and the hushed crowds. "You violated the terms of a duel, done to establish your own honour. You have conceded yourself guilty of the charges levied against you, and dishonoured yourself and your house. You are stricken from the list of the honoured henceforth. Your house's properties and wealth are confiscated henceforth. Your name is to be stricken from the records. And at a time of our choosing, you shall face judgement for your crimes."

The words fell hollow upon Nachlan Gaunt's ears. He stared around him in disbelief, looking last of all up at Sir Cadogan.

The knight stared back, down at his defeated enemy.

Then, with all the deliberation and force in the world, he brought his foot upon Gaunt's fallen wand, and broke it in two.


	22. Song and Story

_By the time the old man's tale had finished, the sun was heavy over the horizon and all the children were in various states of dozing._

_He smiled to himself, and pulled himself carefully out of his chair, gently dislodging several napping grandchildren, and stepped quietly to the study's egress. He knew their parents knew where they were. They would be collected in time. Heavens knew the summer had all the time in the world._

_He left the manor and stepped briskly through the Hogsmeade streets, returning the waves of wizards and witches who were waiting outside and enjoying the warm evening. He knew most of them by name now. Many of them were of his generation._

_He had enjoyed simply telling the story out loud, Sir Trilby Longbottom reflected, even after the children had all drifted off. Storytelling was something so easily enjoyed for its own sake. Breathing a story into history, a narrative into events that had seemed so disconnected at the time, was a rewarding task._

_Admittedly, his version had been mostly from his own point of view, and had contained more dashing sword fights against dark lords than were strictly realistic, but the children had hardly objected. The fact that most of them were asleep at the time was entirely beside the point._

_The sun really was low in the horizon, and painted the sky colours that a painter would have died to render. Considering the nature of the upcoming task of the evening, that hopefully wouldn't be necessary._

_He walked all the way up the road to Hogwarts, where his wife Katherine held court as the Headmistress. He wore his years well, the result of wizard medicine and food. His hair was iron-grey now, and he used a stick when walking long distances, but his green and brown eyes still sparkled as bright as they ever did._

_He circled around Hogwarts, making his way to the official residence of the representative from the muggle courts to Hogwarts. Of course, no muggle sovereign had actually known of the post ever since Balliol had been overthrown in the wars of decades past._

_He found Sir Cadogan waiting outside the cottage he had lived in since arriving at Hogwarts, looking out over the waters of the lake._

_The old knight was white-whiskered and plumper than ever, and his years in the saddle had finally manifested in bandy legs and a crooked gait. But you only had to look at his weathered face and crooked grin to know that he hardly changed a bit._

_He turned as Trilby arrived, and raised a brow._

_"Odsbodikins, is it that time?"_

_"I fear so," Trilby grinned. "My wife requested this for you, and she assigned me to making sure you went through with it."_

_Sir Cadogan harrumphed._

_"Well, if it has to happen, then let it be over with. But it's a waste of time. And I don't see why I have to do it with these props." He waved a gauntleted hand at a collection items at the side of the cottage. A fat grey pony, a descendant of Trilby's when he first arrived at Hogwarts, nibbled at the grass. An ornamental sword leaned against the wall. The armour Sir Cadogan wore looked especially polished in the sun._

_"Call them aids to posterity."_

_"Posterity? Bah. I've got no interest in being memorialised. A painting seems excessive."_

_"You are the knight who broke House Gaunt. Amongst other things. That makes you a part of wizarding history, sir."_

_"Listen, only people on plinthes and on dusty scrolls deserve to called a part of history. I'm still very much alive and kicking."_

_"For what it's worth, you do appear on a few scrolls."_

_"Bah." Cadogan resumed admiring the sunset. Trilby stood beside him._

_"The thing is," said Cadogan, after a moment's silence, "Posterity isn't something I care for. What people think of you, in life or after it, is worthless compared to what you actually do. I'm happy with my life, lad. I don't need it recorded in song and story, or with a bunch of paints, for that matter."_

_"But there's no harm in making sure others don't forget. Children in future years will remember that tyrants can be fought. That they can be beaten."_

_"Well..."_

_"So please be polite to the painter when he shows up. Being made a caricature out of a fit of pique won't help posterity."_

_Sir Cadogan considered this. "Bugger posterity. I've said it a hundred times, and I'll say it a hundred times more. Actions matter, and the why of the actions. Nothing else."_

_Trilby sighed, just as the painter appeared. He was a slight young man with an armful of canvas and an unfolding stand, and a case of paints hung from a box set in his belt._

_"Aha, and who's this vagabound?" said Cadogan abruptly, rounding on the painter. "Oh. My pardon. You must be the recorder of posterity."_

_"Indeed," said the man, raising one thin eyebrow. "And I assume you are the knight Cadogan?"_

_"You assume correctly. If you're here to paint, then get your business over with post-haste. I have other things to do, and watch," said Cadogan, gesturing at the sunset._

_"Then let's finish this as quickly as possible, shall we?" said the young man tonelessly, as he set down his stand and unrolled canvas._

_Trilby pressed the ornamental sword upon the reluctant Cadogan, and gave him the reins of the pony. The knight continued to look at the painter with a look of exaggerated belligerence._

_"You'll set a ghastly example if that gets set down on canvas," said Trilby quietly. "They'll call you the Mad Knight."_

_"Perfectly accurate," said Sir Cadogan with satisfaction. "Perfectly accurate, lad."_

_The young painter directed Trilby out of the picture, and made sure he had a clear frame of Cadogan, backed by the sunset upon a grassy field. He assayed the sight before him, taking in the oversized sword, the grazing pony, and the mad old knight critically regarding him. Off to one side, the lord of House Longbottom fought to hide a grin.  
_

_He touched the brush to the enchanted paint, and the paint to canvas, and wove posterity._


End file.
